VOLUME IX
FRIEDRICH HEBBEL
OTTO LUDWIG
THE GERMAN CLASSICS
Masterpieces of German Literature
TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH
Patrons' Edition IN TWENTY VOLUMES
ILLUSTRATED
1914
CONTENTS OF VOLUME IX
Friedrich Hebbel
The Life of Friedrich Hebbel. By William Guild Howard
Maria Magdalena. Translated by Paul Bernard Thomas
Siegfried's Death. Translated by Katherine Royce
Anna. Translated by Frances H. King
On Theodor Körner and Heinrich von Kleist. Translated by Frances H. King
Ludolf Wienbarg's _The Dramatists of the Present Day_. Translated by
Frances H. King
Review of Heinrich von Kleist's Play, _The Prince of Homburg, or The
Battle of Fehrbellin_. Translated by Frances H. King
Recollections of My Childhood. Translated by Frances H. King Extracts
from the Journal of Friedrich Hebbel
Otto Ludwig
The Life of Otto Ludwig. By Alexander R. Hohlfeld
The Hereditary Forester. Translated by Alfred Remy
Between Heaven and Earth. Translated by Muriel Almon
ILLUSTRATIONS--VOLUME IX
Summer Day. By Arnold Bucklin Frontispiece
Friedrich Hebbel 2
Death as Cup-Bearer. By Alfred Rethel 30
Death Playing the Finale at the Masquerade. By Alfred Rethel 60
Death as Friend. By Alfred Rethel 78
Title Page of the Nibelungenlied. By Peter Cornelius 82
Siegfried's Return from the Saxon War. By Schnorr von Carolsfeld 100
The Quarrel of the Queens. By Schnorr von Carolsfeld 122
Kriemhild finds the Slain Siegfried. By Schnorr von Carolsfeld 150
Kriemhild accuses Hagen of the Murder of Siegfried. By Schnorr von
Carolsfeld 170
The Battle between the Huns and the Nibelungs. By Schnorr von
Carolsfeld 190
Gunther and Hagen brought Captive before Kriemhild. By Schnorr von
Carolsfeld 222
The Death of Kriemhild. By Schnorr von Carolsfeld 246
Otto Ludwig 268
The Finding of Moses. By Schnorr von Carolsfeld 300
Moses on Mt. Sinai. By Schnorr von Carolsfeld 330
Jacob and Rachel at the Well. By Schnorr von Carolsfeld 360
Jacob's Journey. By Schnorr von Carolsfeld 390
David being Stoned by Sinei. By Schnorr von Carolsfeld 420
The Death of Eli. By Schnorr von Carolsfeld 450
Josiah hears the Law. By Schnorr von Carolsfeld 480
The Prophet Jeremiah. By Schnorr von Carolsfeld 510
EDITOR'S NOTE
The painters represented here alongside with the two writers to whom
this volume is devoted, are Cornelius, Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Rethel,
and Kaulbach. These men were not only contemporary with Hebbel and
Ludwig, but may indeed be called their artistic counterparts. Though
widely differentiated by individual temper and talent, these painters
and poets belong to the same phase of mid-century German literature and
art: the striving of Romanticism beyond itself, the struggle for a new
style uniting depth of feeling and terseness of delineation, the longing
for a new view of life harmonizing the worship of the past with the
demands of modern society and the problems of the day. Hence the heroic
note in the work of these painters and poets, hence their predilection
for great historical or mythological or religious subjects, hence their
leaning toward tragic conflicts in every day situations, hence their all
too conscious striving for pointed effects; hence, also, the inspiring
influence emanating from their best productions.
KUNO FRANCKE.
THE LIFE OF FRIEDRICH HEBBEL
By WILLIAM GUILD HOWARD, A.M.,
Assistant Professor of German, Harvard University
The greatest German dramatists of the middle of the nineteenth century
were Franz Grillparzer, Friedrich Hebbel, and Otto Ludwig. In a caustic
epigram written in 1855, Grillparzer set forth that Dame Poetry, for
some years a widow and now ailing, needed a husband, but could find
none; and we remember that the heroine of _Libussa_ rejects the wise
Lapak, the strong Biwoy, and the rich Domaslaw because she desires in
one man, united, the qualities which separately dominate the three. With
more charity, Grillparzer might have more fully recognized the poet in
Hebbel or Ludwig; but we may be permitted to think of these three
dramatists as not unlike the three suitors for the hand of Libussa:
Grillparzer was rich, Ludwig was wise, and Hebbel was strong. Each of
them was somewhat deficient in the qualities of the other two; each,
however, was a personality, and Hebbel one of the most powerful that
ever lived.
Hebbel's career is a long battle against all but insuperable obstacles.
Born at Wesselburen in the present province of Schleswig-Holstein on
March 18, 1813, he was the son of a poor stone mason--so poor that, as
Hebbel said, poverty had taken the place of his soul. Though Klaus
Hebbel was a well-meaning man, he was a slave to the inexorable _non
possumus_ of penury. In winter, especially, lack of work made even the
provision of daily bread often difficult and sometimes impossible for
him. But Friedrich Hebbel's childhood, full of hardship as it was, was
not cheerless. The father did what he could; and the mother, at whatever
sacrifice to herself, could nearly always do something for the children.
The greatest hardship was caused by the father's hostility to these
maternal concessions to childish desires; for to him, whose life was
labor, unproductive use of time was a crime. He thought it a matter of
course that his son should become a laboring man like himself, and it is
little less than a miracle that this did not happen. The mother, to be
sure, fostered the boy's more ambitious hopes; the death of the father
in Hebbel's fourteenth year was perhaps a blessing in disguise;
undoubtedly the happiest chance in Hebbel's boyhood, so far as external
events are concerned, was the fact that he won the favor of a real
teacher in his schoolmaster Dethlefsen, who not only gave his education
the proper start, but also recommended him, as his best scholar, to the
local magistrate, J.J. Mohr.
For nearly eight years (1827 to 1835) Hebbel was in Mohr's employ, first
as an errand boy, and ultimately as a clerk, to whom more and more
official business was intrusted. He lived in the household of his
superior, continued in the magistrate's library the assiduous reading
which he had begun with Dethlefsen's books, and acquired, along with the
habits of official accuracy, something of the ways of a higher social
station than that to which he had been born. His contact with the world
of affairs and with litigation also considerably broadened his outlook,
though it was often the seamy side of life that he saw, and his own
early necessities had sharpened his sense of the essential tragedy of
existence. Among the young people of the town Hebbel was as active and
inventive as any; he wrote verses, took part in amateur theatricals, and
was a leader in many undertakings that had not amusement as their sole
object.
From the beginning Hebbel shows extraordinary sensitiveness to esthetic
appeal and a disposition to dreamy imaginativeness. The Bible, the
Protestant hymnal, pre-classical prose and poetry of the eighteenth
century, as well as contemporary romantic fiction, including Jean Paul,
Hoffmann, and Heine, touched his fancy and stirred him to emulation.
[Illustration: FRIEDRICH HEBBEL]
As a boy, he is said to have composed a tragedy _Evolia, the Captain of
Robbers_, which his mother confiscated and burned. His early poems are
echoes of Klopstock, Matthisson, Hölty, Bürger, and other predecessors;
but especially of Schiller, whose moral seriousness and sonorous
language alike inspired the serious and rhetorically gifted youth. The
influence of Schiller, however, marks no epoch in the poetic development
of Hebbel; it dominates the period of adolescence. The sense of poetry
was aroused in him as a boy, he said, by Paul Gerhardt's hymn "The woods
are now at rest" (_Nun ruhen alle Wãlder_); the discovery of what poetry
is he made in 1830, when he read Uhland's _Minstrel's Curse_ and
perceived that the sole principle of art is not to write, like Schiller,
eloquently about ideas, but "to make in a particular phenomenon the
universal intuitively perceptible."
Having published poems and stories from 1829 on in a local newspaper,
Hebbel, in 1831, seeking a wider audience at the same time that he
longed for a larger sphere of activity, submitted specimens of his work
to Amalie Schoppe in Hamburg, the editress of a fashion paper; and in
this and the following years she printed a considerable number of his
productions. Moreover, she took a genuine personal interest in his
ambitions; and after several plans had proved abortive, she succeeded
in collecting for him a small sum of money and the promise of other
material aid in a plan that should give a firm foundation for the
structure of his hopes: he should come to Hamburg and prepare for the
study of law. Accordingly, on the fourteenth of February, 1835, he left
his modest but secure position in Wesselburen for the alluring great
world where he felt that he belonged, but where he was destined to toil
and to suffer, in a struggle for existence which only a hardy
North-German peasant could have endured.
Hebbel came to Hamburg as a young man of twenty-two, far ahead of his
years in knowledge, judgment, and capacity, but still unacquainted with
rudimentary things belonging to higher education, such as Latin grammar.
He could not find the right tone in dealing with his benefactors, and he
suffered unspeakable humiliation in the conflict of a proud and
independent spirit with the subjection which inconsiderate well-wishers
imposed upon him. He learned more by private reading and by association
with students in a Scientific Society than he learned in school; and to
one woman, Elise Lensing, who became his friend and angel of mercy, he
owed more than to the whole aggregation of those who gave him money and
meals. Somewhat more than eight years his senior, in respect to
experience of the world and training in the finer graces of life his
superior, she aided, encouraged, and loved him, well aware that his
feeling for her was, at the most, admiration and gratitude, and that the
intimate union and companionship which soon became for him an
indispensable solace could never lead to marriage.
In Hamburg Hebbel began the diary which, continued throughout his life,
is the most valuable source of information about him that we have, and
which, being the repository of his meditations as well as the record of
his experiences, is one of the most remarkable documents of the kind
ever composed. He wrote and published a number of poems, and began
several short stories. More significant, however, was the development
of his critical faculty, which found in the Scientific Society a free
field for exercise. Here, on the twenty-eighth of July, 1835, Hebbel
read a paper on Theodor Körner and Heinrich von Kleist which, in spite
of a rather juvenile tone, shows a maturity of insight quite
unparalleled in the critical literature of that day. It is greatly to
Hebbel's credit, and was to his profit, as the sequel showed, that
against the opinion of his generation he could demonstrate the poetic
excellence of Kleist and could distinguish in Körner between the heroic
patriot and the mediocre poet; for it was a dramatic masterpiece that
Hebbel analyzed in Kleist's _Prince of Hamburg_, and in this analysis he
formulated views that remained the canons of all his subsequent activity
as a playwright. The study of Kleist gave him for the drama the same
sort of illumination that Uhland had given him for lyric poetry.
Though Hebbel was unable to acquire in Hamburg a certificate of
preparedness for the university, he soon felt ready for university
studies, and after some difficulty persuaded his benefactors to give him
the balance of the fund that they had collected, and consent to his
going to Heidelberg. In March, 1836, he departed thither, with less than
eighty thalers in his pocket. He could be admitted only as a special
student; nevertheless, he was hospitably received by members of the
faculty of law, and attended their lectures. But the romantic scenery of
Heidelberg, and, the reading of Goethe and Shakespeare, whom he now for
the first time studied thoroughly, were more fruitful and suggestive to
him than jurisprudence, however much he was interested in "cases" as
examples of human experience. Such a "case" he treated in _Anna_, the
first short story with which he was satisfied, and which indeed is
worthy of his model in this _genre_, Kleist. Other narratives, and a few
poems, testify to a closer approach to nature and a less morbid attitude
toward life than had appeared in the earlier works. Hebbel was now
finishing his apprenticeship, wisely restraining the impulse to
dramatize until in the less exacting forms he had mastered the means of
expression. But everything pointed toward literature as a calling, and
before the year was out Hebbel resolved to migrate to Munich, still, to
be sure, a student, but from the moment of his arrival living there
under the name and title of _Literat_.
The journey to Munich Hebbel made afoot, leaving Heidelberg on September
12, 1836. He passed through Strassburg, and thought of Goethe as he
climbed the tower of the cathedral; he visited the Suabian poets at
Stuttgart and Tübingen, and was deeply disappointed with the kindly but
undemonstrative Uhland; and he reached Munich on September the
twenty-ninth. Here he remained until March, 1839.
Hebbel's two and a half years in Munich, years of solitude, unheard-of
privation, illness, and battling against despair, came near to wearing
out the physical man, and were, through long-continued insufficient
nourishment, the cause of the disease to which he finally succumbed; but
they were also the finishing school of the personality that henceforth
unflinchingly faced the world and demanded to be heard. Hebbel provided
for his material needs partly by journalistic work, to which he was
ill-adapted, but chiefly through the limitless bounty of Elise
Lensing--for months at a time the only being with whom, and only by
correspondence, he had human intercourse. He heard the lectures of
Schelling and Görres at the university; but, as at Heidelberg, he,
gained most by prodigious reading in literature, history; and
philosophy. His savage melancholy found relief in grimly humorous
narratives and gloomy poems. At the time of his greatest wretchedness he
conceived the plots of comedies, "ridiculing something by the
representation of nothing." But we note that his reading now begins to
suggest to him innumerable subjects for tragedies, such as Napoleon,
Alexander the Great, Julian the Apostate, the Maid of Orleans, Judith
and Holofernes, Golo and Genoveva,--all of them characters the key to
whose destiny lay in their personalities, and in whom Hebbel saw the
destiny of mankind typified. Still more directly, however, the tragedy
of human life was brought home to him--not merely through his personal
struggle for existence, but through the death of Emil Rousseau, a dear
friend who had followed him from Heidelberg to Munich, the death of his
mother, for whose necessities he had of late been able to do but little,
and misfortune in the family of Anton Schwarz, a cabinet maker, with
whose daughter, Beppy, Hebbel had been on too intimate terms. Hebbel's
dramas _Judith_, _Genoveva_, and _Maria Magdalena_ all germinated during
these terrible years of the sojourn in Munich.
But the actual output of these years was not large. Attempts to publish
a volume of poems and a volume of short stories had failed.
Nevertheless, Hebbel was no longer an unknown quantity in the world of
letters when, in the early spring of 1839, he decided to return to
Hamburg. Hope of aid from Campe, Heine's publisher, and from Gutzkow,
the editor of a paper published by Campe, encouraged this decision. But
Hebbel was really going home, going back to Elise, after having
accomplished the purpose of his pilgrimage, even though for lack of
money he could not take with him a doctor's degree. He came as a man who
could do things for which the world gives a man a living. The return
journey, lasting from the eleventh to the thirty-first of March, 1839,
amid alternate freezing and thawing, was a tramp, than which only the
retreat from Moscow could have been more frightful; but Hebbel
accomplished it, more concerned for the little dog that accompanied him
than for his own sufferings. And it appeared that he had wisely chosen
to return; for he found opportunity for critical work in Gutzkow's
_Telegraph_, and Campe published the works which in rapid succession he
now completed: _Judith_ (1840), _Genoveva_ (1841), _The Diamond_ (1841;
printed in 1847), and _Poems_ (1842).
These publications won fame for Hebbel and yielded some immediate
pecuniary gain. But although he had reached the goal of his ambition in
having become a poet, and a dramatist whose first play had appeared on
the stage, he still lacked a settled occupation and a sure income.
Having been born a Danish subject, he conceived the idea of a direct
appeal to Christian VIII. of Denmark for such an appointment as the king
might be persuaded to give him. In spite of the unacademic course of his
studies and his lack of strictly professional training, he thought of a
professorship of esthetics at Kiel. Even in those days, when
professorships could be had on easier terms than now, this was a wild
dream. But Hebbel did not appeal to his sovereign in vain. He spent the
winter of 1842-43 in Copenhagen, where the Danish-German dramatist
Oehlenschläger smoothed his path to royal favor; and after two audiences
with Christian VIII. he was granted a pension of six hundred thalers a
year for two years, in order that by traveling he might learn more of
the world and cultivate his poetic talents. His first expression of
gratitude for this privilege was the tragedy _Maria Magdalena_, begun at
Hamburg in May, finished at Paris in December, 1843, and dedicated to
the king.
Hebbel's departure for Paris, in September, 1843, did not mean for him
what Heine's settlement there twelve years before had meant for
Heine--the beginning of a new life. Hebbel's knowledge of French was
very imperfect, and he was as much isolated in Paris as he had been in
Munich; he did not seek stimulus from without so much as freedom to
develop the ideas that were teeming in his mind. When he left Hamburg,
however, he was destined never to return thither except as a visitor,
and started on the long, roundabout way to an unforeseen new home in
Vienna. He had been but little over a month in Paris when he learned of
the death of the little son that Elise had borne him three years before.
He was deeply grieved both for himself and for the despairing mother, to
whom he offered all the comfort he could give, not excepting marriage,
as soon as he should ever be able to provide for her. In May, 1844,
Elise bore him another son who, dying in 1847, was never seen by his
father. Hebbel did not forget what he owed to the mother of his
children, but he felt the debt more and more as an obligation, in the
fulfilment of which there was no prospect of satisfaction to either.
Despite the fact that she had a hundred times declared to him that he
was free, all her dreaming and planning tended solely to keep him bound.
He, who had been her pupil, had now far outgrown her capacity to
understand his endeavors and achievements; and he felt that he could
sacrifice much for her, but not himself, his personality, and his
mission. And so the unwholesome relation wore on, with aggravating
burdensomeness, to the inevitable crisis.
In the fall of 1844 Hebbel journeyed from Paris to Rome. He had met few
notables in Paris--Heine, Felix Bamberg, and Arnold Ruge almost complete
the tale--but in Italy he, like Goethe, made the acquaintance of a group
of German artists, and followed their leadership in the study of ancient
art. He enjoyed this study in natural, unaffected appreciation of the
beautiful; and a certain artistic polish distinguishes the poems which
nature and art in Italy inspired him to write. The Italian journey,
however, was far from being a renaissance to him as it had been to
Goethe. Hebbel remained a Northern artist. Vesuvius impressed him, but
Pompeii proved a disappointment; it was laid out, he said, like any
other city. He departed from Rome in October, 1845, richer in the
friendship of distinguished men--including Hermann Hettner--and in
accumulated experience, but not as one to whom the _Ponte Molle_ is a
bridge of sighs.
Hebbel's design was to return to Hamburg by way of Vienna. In Vienna,
which he reached on the fourth of November, 1845, he was cordially
received in literary circles. Men of influence promised their good
offices in getting his plays performed, but failed to take effective
measures, and he was about to continue his journey when the romantic
enthusiasm of two young barons Zerboni gave him an _entrée_ into
aristocratic society, and he tarried. Ere long he had decided to stay
for life. In Christine Enghaus, the leading lady at the
_Hofburgtheater_, he found the feminine counterpart to his masculine
nature; and on the twenty-sixth of May, 1846, they were married.
From every point of view this marriage proved so perfect that we may
well question whether anything whatever ought to have been allowed to
stand in the way of it. To Elise, of course, it seemed an outrage--the
more so that she was entirely mistaken as to the character of Christine;
and with furious bitterness she reproached Hebbel for violating her most
sacred rights in his infatuation for an actress. The storm broke, but it
cleared the air for both; and upon the death of her second son in 1847,
Elise came at Christine's invitation to Vienna and spent a year in the
Hebbel household.
Hebbel himself rightly dated an epoch in his life from his marriage and
the renewed productivity which followed upon it. He enjoyed now for the
first time not only freedom from economic worries but also complete
serenity of mind. Outwardly, indeed, he still had to keep up his
offensive and defensive warfare. Beyond the circle of his immediate
adherents, only the more enlightened of his contemporaries, such as
Ruge, Hettner, and Theodor Vischer, perceived what he was aiming at, and
his own public discussions were so abstruse and repellent that it is no
wonder they were misunderstood. Grillparzer declared that he was groping
in esthetic fog. Julian Schmidt recognized his power and the poetic
charm of many of his passages, but thought him in danger of crossing the
line which separates sense from nonsense, genius from insanity. Hebbel
was restive under criticism, and the method of his polemics tended
rather to exasperate than to conciliate his adversaries. Meanwhile
_Maria Magdalena_ and _Judith_ were performed at the _Hofburgtheater_,
with Christine as the heroine. But in 1850 Heinrich Laube became
director of this theatre, and he not only rejected one play of Hebbel's
after another, but also withdrew from Christine the leading parts which
she had heretofore taken in the regular repertory.
The new epoch in Hebbel's dramatic activity really began in 1848. The
fruits of his sojourn in Italy, _A Tragedy in Sicily_ (1846), _Julia_
(1847), and _New Poems_ (published in 1847) were mediocre stragglers in
the train of his first successes. But _Herodes and Mariamne_, begun in
1847 and completed in November, 1848, is the first of a new series of
masterpieces. Mariamne, Hebbel said, was not simply written for
Christine, she _was_ Christine. _The Ruby_, which followed in the spring
of 1849, is a graceful dramatization of a fairy-tale written ten years
before in Munich; _Michel Angelo_ (1850), a satire on his critics, is a
slight but clever refutation of ignorant presumption. _Agnes Bernauer_
(1851) is a worthy successor of _Herodes and Mariamne_; _Gyges and his
Ring_ (1854) is the most poetic and perhaps the most characteristic of
his dramas. The trilogy on the _Nibelungen_ (1855-1860) was Hebbel's
last great work, ranking with Grillparzer's _Golden Fleece_ and
Schiller's _Wallenstein_; and if he had lived to complete _Demetrius_,
we should have had another remarkable drama, on a subject which Schiller
too was destined to leave unfinished.
In the fifties, Hebbel accompanied Christine on professional trips to
North Germany, and had ample occasion to observe the spread of his
influence. In 1852 he was fêted at Munich in connection with the
production there of _Agnes Bernauer_. In 1858 he attended a performance
of _Genoveva_ in Weimar, and was decorated with an order by the Grand
Duke. In 1861 the Nibelungen trilogy was performed for the first time in
Weimar, with Christine as Brunhild and Kriemhild; and in the following
year Hebbel, who had even thought of going to live at Weimar, was the
guest of the Grand Duke at his castle in Wilhelmsthal. Though in Vienna
honors came later, Hebbel felt himself to be during these years at the
summit of his existence. In 1855 he bought a country home at Orth near
Gmunden in the Salzkammergut, and to the idyllic atmosphere of that
retreat he owed the inspiration for the epic poem _Mother and Child_
(1857), his gentlest treatment of a tragic theme. In 1857 he issued a
definitive edition of his _Poems_, dedicated to Uhland, "the first poet
of the present time." In 1854 _Genoveva_, in modified form, was
successfully presented as _Magellone_ at the _Burgtheater_, with
Christine as the heroine. But Hebbel's first Viennese triumph did not
come until February 19, 1863, when Christine played Brunhild in the
first and second parts of the _Nibelungen_. On his deathbed he received
the news that the Berlin Schiller Prize had been awarded to him for the
_Nibelungen_. Hebbel died on the thirteenth of December, 1863. Christine
out-lived him by nearly half a century, until the twenty-ninth of June,
1910.
Rightly or wrongly, Hebbel regarded himself as the creator of a new form
of drama, setting in at a step beyond Shakespeare and Schiller, and
attacking problems in the manner suggested, but not fully developed, by
Goethe. Shakespeare and Schiller, he said, locate the conflict in the
breast of the hero: shall he, or shall he not, endeavor to attain the
object of his desire, against forces which oppose him from without, and
which have their allies in his own conscience, in his own sense of right
and wrong? He desires the wrong, or neglects the right, and for his
tragic fault atones with death. We pity the unfortunate individual,
console ourselves, however, with the inviolability of the moral law, and
profit by his example: only those are free whose will chooses to be
moral. But Goethe, in the dramatically conceived _Elective Affinities_,
focuses attention not upon the doings of individuals, but upon the
sanctions of the law which a power superior to their wills forces them
to break. And so Hebbel, passing over the individual, as one of myriads,
directs inquiry into the causes that make him what he is, that make him
do what he does, that prevent him from doing what at the same time they
impel him to attempt; and he reveals, back of the individual typical
phenomenon, an irreconcilable conflict in the very condition and
definition of its existence. This conflict has its roots in the dualism
of all being.
The corner-stone of Martin Luther's system of morals was the paradox: "A
Christian is a sovereign lord over all things, and is subject to nobody;
a Christian is a duty-bound servant of all things, and is subject to
everybody." In other words, a man's soul is his own and is superior to
all the things of the flesh; but through his body he is made dependent
upon the life-giving earth, and subject to the laws which those other
"bodies" in the community in which he lives make for the common defense
and the general welfare. Hebbel carried the antithesis farther, asking
what is the soul, and what is the body? And he answered, in effect, that
the soul is indeed the very essence of personality, but is no original,
self-begotten, and self-sufficient entity--on the contrary, it is a
fragment, a participant in the animating principle of the universe--and
that the body is indeed the medium of contact between person and person,
but is also the separating barrier of soul from soul, and of the
individual soul from the soul of the world. The body is the form or
vessel which vouchsafes to the soul individual existence, and which the
soul, by its very impulse to activity, wears out and destroys. Birth is
a prophecy of destruction and a doom to death.
But life is activity, the soul is a motive force, self-assertion and
self-preservation are heaven's first law. Self-assertion, however, is
nothing but the operation of communicated and committed animation, and
self-preservation nothing but the postponement of the day of surrender.
Self-preservation is impossible; self-assertion is a challenge to the
assertiveness of other selves, as well as a hastener of dissolution. The
self follows its native bent, and its native impulse is for expansion;
but it thus, as a fraction, leaves, on its centrifugal path, the course
of the great world spirit from which it separates; and as both a
separate entity and a member of a community it must, in its attempt at
self-realization, meet the constraint which the community, whose only
object is likewise self-realization and self-preservation, puts upon all
within its power. The law is negative and repressive, self-interest is
positive and assertive; between the two there is no possible
reconciliation--at most a compromise--so that in the last analysis it
appears that the assertion of individual will as such is immoral, that
is, contrary to the will of the community; and is sinful, for it is not
the will of God, but the will of a particularized individual, however
godly he may be. There are differences in degree, but not in kind, among
immoralities and sins, with corresponding degrees of punitive
repression; but the potential tragic conflict is constant, and there is
as little doubt about the eminent domain of the State as about the
supremacy of God.
The laws of God are changeless and eternal, but human morality is a
local and temporal development. As the character of an individual is the
product of disposition and experience, so his fate is humanly determined
by the particular forms of custom and law established in the community
in which his lot is cast. But these change from time to time, and in
periods of change the disparity between public and private interest is
most conspicuous: the progressive individual bears not only the burden
of proof but also the dead weight of public inertia. Only at infinity
can the parallel antithetical interests coincide. Nevertheless, the
world gradually effects self-correction by the evolution of new
syntheses from the thesis and antithesis ever and anon presented for
trial and judgment as between liberal and conservative forces.
Hebbel's drama, then, is the representation of a process, the process of
life, by which things come into being. It reveals the individual in the
making, and discusses the validity of the institutions that condition
his life or cause his death. There is no question of guilt and
atonement. Protagonist and antagonist are right, each in his way and
from his point of view; the conflict may arise from excess of goodness
as well as from excess of evil; but the representative of the whole
prevails of necessity over the champion of a single interest; and in the
knowledge of this truth, rather than in the futile attempt to modify the
relation, we must seek our freedom. Hebbel's plays are historical:
character in its setting of circumstances is the only character really
and fully comprehensible. They are sociological: exhibiting the
ceaseless collision of individualistic and collectivistic tendencies,
they teach forbearance, and patience, and the will to face the
facts--_tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner_. And they are modern:
treating problems of character and _milieu_, they disdain the
adventitious aids of eloquence and theatrical splendor, and speak to us
with the directness, often with the bluntness, of nature herself. Hebbel
was no naturalist, in the sense of one who seeks but to reproduce
phenomena in all their details, sordid, trivial, or vulgar, if such they
be. But through Ibsen, who esteemed him alone among his German
predecessors, he became a factor in the recent naturalistic movement;
and he might have saved it from many an aberration, if his example had
been more closely followed.
Hebbel strikingly revealed his independence and originality at the
beginning of his public career, by his new conception of old and
familiar subjects. His Judith is a totally different person from the
heroine of the Apocrypha. The Biblical Judith is a widow who slays a
public enemy, and returns unscathed amid the plaudits of the multitude.
But Hebbel's Judith is a widow who has never been a wife, a woman who
seems to have been appointed by Providence to do a great deed in His
service, who takes the duty upon herself only to find that as a woman
she is unequal to it; for as a woman she loves the manly heathen. She
kills him, as she set out to do; but the motive for her act is personal
revenge for a personal outrage; and she returns to Bethulia broken in
spirit and appalled at the thought that she may bear a son by
Holofernes. The attempt to make of herself an impersonal instrument in
the hands of the Almighty--certainly a laudable undertaking--is her only
fault, and is tragic because inconsistent with the character of
womanhood, which the Almighty has also ordained. Compared with the iron
necessity of her being, to which Judith succumbs, the accidental and
improbable fault of Schiller's Maid of Orleans seems as trivial as it is
conventional.
Similarly, in the conception of the story of Genoveva, Hebbel shifted
attention from the saint to the sinner. In the centre of his _Genoveva_
stands Golo, the unfortunate young man whose good instincts are made
criminal because the faults and errors of others excite them, and
because his desire, justifiable according to nature, is directed toward
a woman who is bound to another in a wedlock which, from the side of the
husband at least, is only formally correct. In Golo's crime and
atonement we accordingly see a great deal more than the operation of the
moral law: we see how crime is begotten of innocence; and instead of
thinking of the wretched creature, we think of the Creator who has so
ordained it, and at whose central position in the moral universe there
can be neither good nor evil, but an equilibrium of forces which become
one or the other, and may become either when the equilibrium is
disturbed. Good and evil, mutually exclusive qualities in the world of
appearance, are, in the world of ideas, complementary conceptions,
different aspects of one and the same thing.
Golo appears, despite his crimes, less guilty than Siegfried, the
husband of Genoveva; and in his case a divine impulse, love, becomes an
evil because it happens to collide with an institution, marriage, which
we are here justified in calling human, since, though it has a social
sanction, it lacks the evidence of divine approval. Clara, in _Maria
Magdalena_, is chargeable with but the minimum of guilt, and perishes
because, too honest and dutiful to safeguard her own interests in a
stern and selfish community, she cannot otherwise preserve for her
father that unassailable reputation which is, in his imperfect ethics,
the highest good. The tragedy in this play is the tragedy of pharisaical
_bourgeois_ society itself. There is no collision between high and low,
such as constituted the plot of the _tragédies bourgeoises_ of the
eighteenth century--e.g., Lessing's _Emilia Galotti_, Schiller's _Cabal
and Love_--but the stubborn hardness of the middle-class society in its
typical representative is unable to meet a crisis; and by the
banishment, or the condemnation to suicide, of its most promising
members, this society pronounces its own doom. Altruism is contrary to
the custom, that is, to the morals of this community, and for that
reason is forbidden and suppressed.
Another community in which altruism is unusual and discredited is Judæa
just before the birth of Christ. Herod the king is a masterful ruler and
a benefactor; but the end justifies the means that he adopts, and he is
no respecter of persons. He does not even respect the person of his
wife. The love of Mariamne is the one sure rock upon which he can rest
when the earthquake, threatening at every moment, comes to shatter his
throne and engulf him. He loves her too with a passion which dreams of
union so perfect that death cannot break it, so perfect that one of them
would wish to die at the moment when the soul of the other left the
body. This is Mariamne's dream also, but Herod cannot trust her to
fulfil it. Not once, but twice, upon going to the wars, he leaves orders
that Mariamne shall be slain if he is killed; and these orders are an
assassination of her soul. The community can execute an individual; but
one individual can only assassinate another. In the ancient orient a
wife was a precious possession, entirely subject to the will of her
husband, and liable to be burned in his funeral pyre. Herod represents
such an ancient, oriental point of view; but Judæa is on the eve of
becoming occidental and modern. Herod represents the law and has the
power to crush the insurgent personality of Mariamne: he has not the
power to slay the infant Savior, nor to hinder the coming of the day
when every human soul is known to be an object of divine concern.
That play of Hebbel's in which the dualism of all being is most
conspicuously tragic is _Agnes Bernauer_. Agnes is the daughter of a
barber and surgeon, and is so beautiful that she is commonly known as
the angel of Augsburg. Albrecht, the son and sole heir of the reigning
duke Ernst, comes to Augsburg, falls in love with her, and, in spite of
friendly warning, marries her; for she has loved him at first sight,
too. As persons, they do what is right for them to do; their marriage
has been performed by a priest of the church; and they feel that it has
divine sanction. But Albrecht is not an ordinary person; he is the heir
to the throne, and public exigencies require that the succession shall
be guaranteed. This marriage, however, is illegal--a board of
incorruptible judges so finds it; it causes sedition and threatens
interminable strife. Duke Ernst is deliberate and patient in dealing
with the unprecedented case. He waits until he can wait no longer.
Albrecht will not give up Agnes, nor Agnes give up him; Ernst respects
the sacrament of wedlock by which they are united, and only after two
and a half years does he sign the warrant by which Agnes was duly
condemned to death. Agnes dies in perfect innocence and constancy, a
victim of social convention. But Albrecht, whose disregard of this
convention was rebellion, and whose vengeance for his wife's death
brings him to the point of parricide, is made to see, not merely because
excommunication accompanies the ban of the empire on him as a rebel, but
also because of the instructive words and actions of his father, that
the social organization he has defied has itself a divine sanction, and
that a prince, standing by common consent at the head of that
organization, cannot with impunity undermine the basis of his
sovereignty. Devotion to him is like loyalty to the national ensign. The
ensign is nothing in itself, but it symbolizes the idea of the State;
and the prince is also the representative of an idea, which he must
continue to represent in its entirety, or he ceases to be the prince.
This lesson Albrecht learns when, like Kleist's _Prince of Homburg_, he
is made judge in his own case, and when he perceives at the cost of what
personal sacrifice his father has done his duty. The State prevails over
Albrecht as it prevails over Agnes, whose only fault was that she did
not immure her beauty in a nunnery.
The sanction of tradition and custom which Albrecht and Agnes could not
break in _Agnes Bernauer_ Hebbel most impressively demonstrated in
_Gyges and his Ring_. Kandaules, King of Lydia, is a rash innovator in
both public and private life. He despises rusty swords and uncomfortable
crowns, he means to do away with silly prejudices, and, like Herod,
regarding his wife as a precious possession only, he procures for his
friend Gyges an opportunity to see her unveiled. But she, an Indian
princess, is, in Christine Hebbel's words, a convolution of veils; her
veil is inseparable from herself; and the brutal violation of her
modesty is a less forgivable crime than the taking of her life would be.
The wearing of a veil may be a foolish custom; but use and want hallow
even the trivial. Half of our law is based upon precedent, and we are
protected at every turn by unwritten law, which is nothing else than
precedent. Mankind needs to repose in the security of this protection.
Woe to him, said Hebbel, who disturbs the sleep of the world! Changes
must come, but rarely in the way of revolution.
The tragedy of the Nibelungen Hebbel approached somewhat differently
from the other subjects that he treated. He had his own conception of
the tragic content of the matter, of course; but he found that the
author of the _Nibelungenlied_, a dramatist from head to foot, has so
clearly presented the tragic aspects of the story that the modern
dramatist need only make himself the interpreter of the medieval epic
poet. Herewith Hebbel's trilogy is at once distinguished from such other
modern treatments of the subject as Geibel's _Brunhild_ or Wagner's
_Nibelungen Ring_. Geibel eliminated everything supernatural; Wagner
made use chiefly of the Old Norse versions of the story; Hebbel, on the
contrary, dramatized what he regarded as the significant content of the
Middle High German poem, retaining its mythological, Christian,
chivalrous, historical, and legendary elements. The mythological
elements of the epic are indeed indistinct survivals of earlier ages.
Hebbel leaned somewhat upon Norse myths in his reproduction of them,
though it was part of his plan to preserve a certain indistinctness and
mystery in these undramatic presuppositions. Similarly, he made more of
the element of Christianity than is made of it by the _Nibelungenlied_.
In both epic and drama the Burgundians are only formally Christian; the
cardinal principles of heathen ethics, tribal loyalty and vengeance, are
entirely unaffected by the Christian doctrine of forgiveness. In the
play, however, the transition from one system to the other is much more
strongly emphasized than in the poem. The heathen ethics lead to the
mutual destruction of those who profess them, and out of the ruins of
the old civilization a new world rises heralded by Theodoric of Verona,
who accepts the sovereignty relinquished by Attila the Hun, "in His name
who died on the cross."
The downfall of two peoples follows in the train of personal calamity.
Siegfried, foreordained by the ancient gods to become the husband of
Brunhild, neglects in the adventurous days of youth to woo her, and
undertakes for the price of Kriemhild's hand to secure her as a wife for
Gunther. Hidden in his cloak of invisibility, he twice overcomes
Brunhild, thereby committing against her the same kind of outrage as
Herod's against Mariamne, and that of Gyges against Rhodope. Through no
direct fault of Siegfried's the fraud is discovered; it is an offense to
the queen, which insults the State. Gunther the king will not punish it,
for he is under personal obligations to the offender; but he takes no
effective measures to prevent punishment by Hagen, who, though his loyal
motives are mixed with envy, acts within his rights as the prime
minister. But Siegfried, being vulnerable in only one spot, cannot be
challenged to open combat; he has to be slain by stealth; so that
Hagen's act is not strictly to be called murder, and the Burgundians,
even though their sense of solidarity should not require them to make
common cause with him against Kriemhild, might with some show of reason
confirm his oath that he is no murderer. Siegfried put himself outside
the pale of humanity when he assumed the dragon's skin. Dragons are
hunted to death. Only men are tried and executed.
We have chosen to examine Hebbel's principal plays from the point of
view of their idea, for the reason that, as said above, it was primarily
the idea which Hebbel found important in every individual phenomenon. He
did not treat cases and conditions for the sake of merely representing
life on the stage, but for the sake of exemplifying, in representations
of life, the fundamental irreconcilability of the expansive and
repressive forces which struggle in every individual. His characters are
certainly persons, not abstract constructions; the action in his plays
moves relentlessly forward, with no lack of inventiveness on his part or
of sensuous impressiveness on the part of his inventions; he seldom
fails to convince our understanding that in his dramatic debate each
side is adequately represented, and that the side which at length
prevails is the stronger under the presuppositions of time and place; it
would be unfair, furthermore, to deny the appeal that he makes to our
sympathy. But, on the other hand, he is not free from suggestions of
artifice; his characters are abnormally introspective and
self-explanatory, and they reveal a talent for logical exposition which
belongs rather to Friedrich Hebbel than to men of like passions with
ourselves. In the unsought, accidental, ingenuous details which
ingratiate themselves in spite, or perhaps because of their
insignificance, he is not to be compared with Grillparzer; nor, in the
capacity to create a poetic atmosphere, with Otto Ludwig. His language
is rugged and masculine; his style, frequently forensic. Taken as a
whole, his work furnishes more abundant food for thought than objects
of _naïve_ esthetic enjoyment; but, like Grillparzer's, his plays were
written for the stage; and proper enactment has seldom failed to produce
with them an effect of power worthy of his powerful personality, which
swam against the tide, knowing that the tide would turn and that the
flood would bear him to the haven.
* * * * *
_FRIEDRICH HEBBEL_
* * * * *
MARIA MAGDALENA
DRAMATIS PERSONÆ
Master ANTONY, _a joiner_
_His Wife_
CLARA, _his daughter_
CARL, _his son_
LEONARD
_A Secretary_ WOLFRAM, a merchant_
ADAM, _a bailiff_
_Another bailiff_
_A Boy_
_A Maid_
_Place. A fair-sized town_
MARIA MAGDALENA (1844)
TRANSLATED BY PAUL BERNARD THOMAS
ACT I
_A Room in the Joiner's House._
SCENE I
_Enter_ CLARA; _the_ MOTHER.
CLARA.
Your wedding dress? Oh, how well it becomes you! It looks as if it had
been made today!
MOTHER.
Yes, child, fashion keeps on going forward until it can go no farther
and has to turn around and go back. This dress has already been out of
style and in again ten times.
CLARA.
But this time it is not exactly in style, dear mother! The sleeves are
too wide! It must not annoy you!
MOTHER (_smiling_).
I should have to be you for that! CLARA.
And so this is the way you looked! But surely you carried a bunch of
flowers too, didn't you?
MOTHER.
I should hope so! Else why do you think I nursed that sprig of myrtle in
the pot for so many years?
CLARA.
I have often asked you to, but you have never before put it on. You have
always said: It is no longer my wedding dress; it is my shroud now, and
that is something one should not play with. I got so that I couldn't
even look at it any more, because, hanging there so white, it always
made me think of your death, and of the day when the old women would try
to pull it on over your head. Why then today?
MOTHER.
When one is very sick, as I was, and does not know whether one is going
to get well again or not, a great many things revolve in one's head.
Death is more terrible than you think--oh, it is awful! It casts a
shadow over the world; one after the other it blows out all the lights
that shine with such cheerful brightness all around us, the kindly eyes
of husband and children cease to sparkle, and it grows dark everywhere.
But deep in the heart it strikes a light, which burns brightly and
reveals a great deal one does not care to see. I am not conscious of
ever having done a wrong; I have walked in God's ways, I have done my
best about the home, I have brought you and your brother up to fear God,
and I have kept together the fruits of your father's hard work. I have
always managed to lay aside an extra penny for the poor, and if now and
then I have turned somebody away, because I felt out of sorts or because
too many came, it wasn't a very great misfortune for him, because I was
sure to call him back and give him twice as much. Oh, what does it all
amount to? People dread the last hour when it threatens to come, writhe
like a worm over it, and implore God to let them live, just as a servant
implores his master to let him do something over again that he has
done poorly, so that he may not come short in his wages on pay-day.
CLARA.
Don't talk in that way, dear mother! It weakens you.
MOTHER.
No, child, it does me good! Am I not well and strong again now? Did
not the Lord call me merely to let me know that my festal robe was not
yet pure and spotless? And did he not permit me to come back from the
very edge of the grave, and grant me time to prepare myself for the
heavenly wedding? He was not as kind as that to those five Virgins in
the Gospel, about whom I had you read to me last night. And that is the
reason why today, when I am going to the Holy Communion, I put this
dress on. I wore it the day I made the best and most pious resolutions
of my life; I want it to remind me of those which I have not yet carried
out.
CLARA.
You still talk as you did in your illness!
SCENE II
CARL (_enters_).
Good morning, mother! Well, Clara, I suppose you might put up with me,
if I were not your brother?
CLARA.
A gold chain? Where did you get that?
CARL.
Why do I sweat so? Why do I work two hours longer than the others every
evening? You are impertinent!
MOTHER.
A quarrel on Sunday morning? Shame on you, Carl!
CARL.
Mother, haven't you got a gulden for me?
MOTHER.
I haven't any money except for the housekeeping!
CARL.
Well, give me some of that then! I won't grumble if you make the
pancakes thinner for the next two weeks. You have often done so before!
I know that all right! When you were saving up for Clara's white dress,
we didn't have anything decent to eat for a month. I shut my eyes, but I
knew right well that a new hair ribbon or some other bit of finery was
on the way. So let me get something out of it too, for once!
MOTHER.
You are absolutely shameless!
CARL.
I haven't much time, else--[_He starts to go_.]
MOTHER.
Where are you going?
CARL.
I won't tell you, and then, when the old growler asks you where I am,
you can answer without blushing that you don't know. Anyway I don't need
your gulden--it is best not to draw all your water from one well.
[_To himself_.]
Here at home they always think the worst things they can about me; why
shouldn't I take pleasure in keeping them worried? Why should I say
that, since I don't get my gulden, I shall have to go to church, unless
a friend helps me out of my predicament?
SCENE III
CLARA.
What does he mean by that?
MOTHER.
Oh, he grieves me terribly! Yes, yes, your father is right! Those are
the consequences! He is just as insolent now in demanding a gulden as he
was cunning in pleading for a piece of sugar when he was a little
curly-headed baby. I wonder if he would not demand the gulden now, if I
had refused him the sugar then? That often hurts me! And I think he
doesn't even love me! Did you ever once see him cry during my illness?
CLARA.
I didn't see him very often at best--almost never except at the table.
He had more appetite than I!
MOTHER (_quickly_).
That was natural! He had to work so hard!
CLARA.
To be sure! And how strange men are! They are more ashamed of their
tears than they are of their sins! A clenched fist--why not exhibit
that? But red eyes!--And father too! The afternoon they opened your vein
and no blood came, he sobbed at his work-bench until it moved my very
soul! But when I went up to him and stroked his cheeks, what did he say?
"See if you can't get this accursèd splinter out of my eye! I have so
much to do and can't accomplish anything!"
MOTHER (_smiling_).
Yes! yes!--I never see Leonard any more, by the way. How does that
happen?
CLARA.
Let him stay away!
MOTHER.
I hope you are not seeing him anywhere else, except here at the house!
CLARA.
Is it because I stay out too long when I go to the well in the evening
that you have reason to suspect that?
MOTHER.
No, not that. But it was just for that reason that I gave him permission
to come here to the house, so that he wouldn't lie in wait for you out
there in the dark. My mother would never allow that, either!
CLARA.
I don't see him at all!
MOTHER.
Have you had a quarrel? Otherwise I think I might like him--he is so
steady! If he only amounted to something! In my time he would not have
had to wait long. Then gentlemen were eager for a good penman, as lame
people are for their crutch, for they were rare. Even we humble people
could use one. Today he would compose for a son a New Year's greeting to
his father and receive for the gilded initials alone enough to buy a
child's doll with. Tomorrow the father would give him a sly wink and
have him read the greeting aloud, secretly and behind closed doors, so
as not to be surprised and have his ignorance discovered. That meant
double pay. Then penmen were jolly people and made the price of beer
high. It is different now. Now we old folks, not knowing anything about
reading and writing, must allow ourselves to be made fun of by
nine-year-old children. The world is steadily growing wiser; perhaps the
time is yet to come when people who can't walk a tight-rope will have to
feel ashamed of it!
CLARA.
The bell is ringing!
MOTHER.
Well, child, I will pray for you. And as far as Leonard is concerned,
love him as he loves God--no more and no less. That is what my old
mother said to me when she died and gave me her blessing. I have kept it
long enough; now you have it!
CLARA (_hands her a nosegay_).
There!
MOTHER.
That certainly comes from Carl.
CLARA (_nods; then aside_.)
Would it were so! Anything that is to give her real pleasure has to come
from him!
MOTHER.
Oh, he is so good--and he likes me! [_Exit_.]
CLARA (_looks after her through the window_).
There she goes! Three times I have dreamt that she was lying in her
coffin, and now--oh, these awful dreams! I am not going to care about
dreams any more; I will take no pleasure in a good dream, and then I
shall not have to worry about the bad one that follows it. How firmly
and confidently she steps out! She is already close to the church-yard.
I wonder who will be the first person she meets? It would signify
nothing--no, I mean only [_she shudders_]--the gravedigger! He has just
finished digging a grave and is climbing out of it! She greets him and
glances smilingly down into the dismal hole! She throws the nosegay into
it and enters the church!
[_A choir is heard_.]
They are singing: _Praise ye the Lord_.
[_She folds her hands_.]
Yes! yes! If my mother had died, I should never have recovered from it,
for--[_Glances toward Heaven_.] But Thou art kind, Thou art merciful! I
would that I believed with the Catholics, so that I might offer Thee
something! I would empty the whole of my little box of savings and buy
Thee a beautiful gilded heart, and twine it with roses. Our pastor says
that sacrifices mean nothing to Thee, because everything is Thine, and
one should not offer Thee something Thou already hast. And yet
everything in the house belongs to my father too; and still he likes it
when I buy a piece of cloth with his money and embroider it and put it
on his plate for his birthday. Yes, and he honors me by wearing it only
on great holidays, at Christmas or Whitsuntide. Once I saw a little mite
of a Catholic girl carrying some cherries up to the altar. They were the
first the child had had that year, and I could see how she longed to eat
them. Still she resisted the innocent desire, and, in order to put an
end to the temptation, hurriedly threw them down. The priest, who was
just about to pick up the chalice, looked on with a scowl, and the child
hastened timidly away. But the Mary above the altar smiled gently, as if
she would have liked to step out of her frame and overtake the child and
kiss her.--I did it for her! Here comes Leonard. Oh, dear!
SCENE IV
LEONARD (_outside the door_).
Are you dressed?
CLARA.
Why so polite, so considerate? I am no princess, you know.
LEONARD (_enters_).
I thought you were not alone! In passing by I thought I saw your
neighbor Babbie standing by the window.
CLARA.
And so that is why--
LEONARD.
You are forever so irritable! One can stay away from here for two weeks,
rain and sunshine can have alternated ten times, and, when one does
finally come again, he finds the same old cloud darkening your face!
CLARA.
Things used to be different!
LEONARD.
Correct! If you had always looked as you do now, we should never have
become good friends!
CLARA.
What of it?
LEONARD.
So you feel yourself as free of me as that, do you? Perhaps it serves me
right! Then [_significantly_] your recent toothache was a mere pretext!
CLARA.
Oh, Leonard, it was not right of you!
LEONARD.
Not right for me to seek to bind to me the greatest treasure that I
have--for that is what you are to me--with the firmest of all bonds? And
especially at a time when I stood in danger of losing it? Do you think I
did not see the furtive glances you exchanged with the Secretary? That
was a triumphant day of joy for me! I take you to the dance and--
CLARA.
You never stop saying things that hurt me! I looked at the Secretary,
why should I deny it? But only on account of the moustache he had grown
at the University, and which--
[_She checks herself_.]
LEONARD.
Becomes him so well--isn't that it? Isn't that what you started to say?
Oh, you women! Anything that looks like a soldier, even a caricature of
one, you like. To me the fop's ridiculous little oval face, with that
tuft of hair in the middle of it, looked like a little white rabbit
hiding behind a bush. I am bitter toward him--I won't try to conceal it.
He held me back from you long enough!
CLARA.
I didn't praise him, did I? You don't need to run him down!
LEONARD.
You still seem to take a lot of interest in him.
CLARA.
We used to play together as children, and afterward--you know very well!
LEONARD.
Oh yes, I know! And that's just why!
CLARA.
Then I think it was only natural, seeing him again for the first time
in a long while that way, for me to look at him and be astonished to see
how big and--[_She checks herself_.]
LEONARD.
Why did you blush then, when he looked back at you?
CLARA.
I thought he was looking at the little mole on my left cheek to see if
it, too, had grown bigger! You know I always imagine people are looking
at that when they stare at me so, and it always makes me blush. I have a
feeling as if it _were_ growing larger, as long as they look at it!
LEONARD.
However that may be, it got on my nerves, and I thought to myself: This
very evening I will put her to the test! If she wants to become my wife,
she knows that she risks nothing. If she says no, then--
CLARA.
Oh, you said a bad, bad word, when I pushed you back and jumped up from
the bench. The moon, which up to that time had shone in through the
foliage with such kindly consideration for me, at that moment sank
shrewdly behind the wet clouds. I wanted to hurry away, but felt
something holding me. At first I thought it was you, but it was the
rose-bush, whose thorns held my dress like teeth. You outraged my heart,
so that I no longer trusted it myself. You stood before me like one
demanding the payment of a debt! I--Oh, God!
[Illustration: ALFRED RETHEL DEATH AS CUP-BEARER]
LEONARD.
I cannot yet regret it. I knew it was the only way I could have kept you
to myself. The old girlhood love was opening its eyes again, and I could
not close them quickly enough!
CLARA.
When I got home, I found my mother ill, mortally ill. She had been
stricken suddenly, as if by an invisible hand. My father had wanted to
send for me, but she would not consent to his doing so, not wishing to
interrupt my happiness. And how I felt when I heard that! I held myself
aloof, I did not dare to touch her, I trembled! She took it for childish
anxiety and motioned me over to her; when I slowly drew near her, she
held me down and kissed my desecrated mouth. I lost control of myself; I
wanted to confess to her, to cry out what I thought and felt: It is my
fault that you are lying there! I tried to do so, but tears and sobs
choked my voice. She reached for my father's hand, and said with a
blissful glance at me: What a heart!
LEONARD.
She is well again. I have come to congratulate her, and--what do you
think?
CLARA.
What?
LEONARD.
To ask your father for your hand.
CLARA.
Oh!
LEONARD.
Don't you want me to?
CLARA.
Want you to? It will mean my death, if I do not become your wife pretty
soon! But you do not know my father! He does not understand why we are
in such a hurry--he cannot understand why, and we cannot tell him why!
And he has declared a hundred times that he will never give his daughter
to any man unless he has not only, as he says, love in his heart for
her, but also bread in his cupboard for her. He will say: Wait another
year or two, my son.--And what will be your answer?
LEONARD. You foolish girl, that difficulty is disposed of! I have the
position now--I am cashier!
CLARA.
You cashier? And the other applicant, the pastor's nephew?
LEONARD.
Was drunk when he came to the examination, bowed to the stove instead of
to the burgomaster, and when he sat down knocked three cups off the
table. You know how hot-headed the old fellow is. "Sir!" he exclaimed
angrily, but he restrained himself and bit his lip. Nevertheless his
eyes glared through his spectacles like the eyes of a serpent about to
spring, and his whole body became rigid. Then we started computing and,
ha! ha!--my rival computed with a multiplication table of his own
invention that gave entirely new results. "He's way off in his
reckoning!" said the burgomaster, and, glancing in my direction, held
out his hand to me with the appointment. It smelled terribly of tobacco,
but I took it and raised it humbly to my lips.--Here it is now, signed
and sealed!
CLARA.
That comes--
LEONARD.
Unexpectedly, doesn't it? Well, it was not altogether an accident
either. Why didn't I come to see you for two weeks?
CLARA.
How do I know? I think it was because we got angry at each other the
Sunday before!
LEONARD.
Oh, I was cunning enough to bring about that little disagreement on
purpose--so that I could stay away without its astonishing you too much!
CLARA.
I don't understand you!
LEONARD.
I suppose not. I took advantage of the time to pay court to the
burgomaster's little hump-backed niece, whom the old fellow thinks so
much of, and who is his right hand, just as the bailiff is his left.
Understand me correctly! I didn't say anything nice to her about
herself, except perhaps a compliment regarding her hair, which everybody
knows is red--so I just told her some nice things she liked to hear
about you.
CLARA.
About me?
LEONARD.
Why should I keep still about it? I did it with the best of
intentions--as if I had never intended to deal seriously with you, as
if--enough! That lasted until I got this in my hands, and the credulous
little man-crazy fool will find out what I meant when she hears the
banns of our marriage published in the church.
CLARA.
Leonard!
LEONARD.
Child! child! You be as innocent as a dove, and I will be as wise as a
serpent. Then, since a man and his wife are one, we shall entirely
satisfy the demand of the Gospel.
[_Laughs_.]
Neither was it altogether an accident that young Hermann was drunk at
the most important moment of his life. You have surely never heard that
the fellow is given to drinking?
CLARA.
Not a word.
LEONARD.
The fact made the execution of my scheme all the easier. It was done
with three glasses. I had a couple of friends of mine waylay him. "May
one drink to your health?"--"Not now!"--"Oh, that is all arranged, you
know. Your uncle"--"And now, drink, my brother, drink!"--This morning
when I was on my way to you, he stood leaning on the bridge and gazing
dejectedly down at the river. I greeted him sarcastically, and asked him
if he had dropped anything into the water. "Yes," he answered, without
looking up, "and perhaps it would be well for me to jump in after it."
CLARA.
You bad man! Get out of my sight!
LEONARD.
You mean it?
[_Moves, as if to go_.]
CLARA.
Oh, my God, I am chained to this man!
LEONARD.
Don't be a baby! And now one more word in confidence: Does your father
still keep the thousand thalers in the apothecary shop?
CLARA.
I know nothing about it.
LEONARD.
Nothing about so important a matter?
CLARA.
Here comes my father.
LEONARD.
Understand me! The apothecary is said to be on the verge of
bankruptcy--that's why I asked!
CLARA.
I must go into the kitchen! [_Exit_.]
LEONARD (_alone_).
Well, I guess there is nothing to be got here! I can't understand it at
all; for Master Antony is one of those fellows whose ghost, if you
should accidentally put one too many letters on his gravestone, would
haunt you until you took it off. For he would regard it as dishonest to
appropriate more of the alphabet than he was properly entitled to.
SCENE V
_Enter_ LEONARD; _Master_ ANTONY.
ANTONY.
Good morning, Mr. Cashier! [_He takes off his cap and puts on a woolen
cap_.] Is it permissible for an old man to keep his head covered?
LEONARD.
You know then--
ANTONY.
Since yesterday evening. When I was going over in the dusk to take the
deceased miller's measure for his final sleeping room, I heard a couple
of your good friends slandering you. I thought right away: I guess
Leonard has not broken his neck.--At the house I heard more about it
from the sexton, who had come to console the widow, and, incidentally,
to get drunk.
LEONARD.
And you had to let Clara find out about it from me?
ANTONY.
If you didn't care enough about it to give the girl that pleasure
yourself, why should I do it? I don't light any candles in my house
except those that belong to me. Then I know that nobody is going to come
and blow them out, just as we are beginning to enjoy them.
LEONARD.
Surely you don't think that I--
ANTONY.
Think? About you? About anybody? I smooth over boards with my plane, but
I never smooth over men with my thoughts. I stopped that sort of
foolishness long ago. When I see a tree growing, I think to myself: It
will soon be blossoming; and when it sprouts: It will soon bear fruit.
In that I never see myself disappointed, and for that reason I don't
give up the old habit. But about men I never think anything, good or
bad, and then I don't have to turn alternately red and white when they
disappoint my fears one minute and my hopes the next. I merely observe
them and use the evidence of my eyes, which likewise do not think, but
only see. I thought I had made a complete observation of you, but now
that I find you here I must confess that it was only half an
observation.
LEONARD.
Master Antony, you have it all upside down. Trees are dependent upon
wind and weather, whereas men have laws and rules in themselves to
govern them.
ANTONY.
Do you think so? Yes, we old people owe hearty thanks to death for
allowing us to run around so long among you young folks, thereby giving
us an opportunity to educate ourselves. Formerly the stupid world used
to think that the father was there to educate his son. But now the son
is supposed to give his father the final touch of perfection, so that
the poor, simple man will not need to feel ashamed of himself before the
worms in his grave. God be praised! I have a fine teacher in my son Carl
who, without sparing his old child by indulgence, takes the field
against my prejudices. He taught me two new lessons this very morning,
and in the most clever way, without opening his mouth and without even
letting me see him--yes, by that very means. In the first place, he
showed me that it is not necessary for a man to keep his word; in the
second, that it is superfluous to go to church and freshen up one's
memory of God's laws. Yesterday evening he promised me that he would go,
and I counted on his doing it, for I thought to myself: He will want to
thank the gracious Creator for the recovery of his mother. But he wasn't
there, and I was very comfortable all alone in my pew, which, to be
sure, is a little too short for two persons anyway. I wonder if he would
like it if I myself were to act in accordance with the new doctrine, by
not keeping my word with him? I have promised him a new suit for his
birthday, and I might take the opportunity to test his joy over my
docility. But prejudice! Prejudice! I shall not do it!
LEONARD.
Perhaps he was not well--
ANTONY.
Possibly! I need only to ask my wife, then I am sure to hear that he is
sick. For she tells me the truth about everything else in the world, but
never about the boy. And even if he was not sick!--There too the younger
generation has the advantage over us old folks, in that they can find
their spiritual edification anywhere, and can do their worshipping when
they are out trapping birds, or taking a walk, or sitting in the
ale-house. "Our Father who art in Heaven"--"Good day, Peter, shall I
see you at the dance this evening?"--"Hallowed be Thy name"--"Yes, laugh
if you will, Catherine, but it is true"--"Thy will be done"--"The devil
take me, I am not shaved yet!"--and so forth. And each one pronounces
the blessing on himself, for he is a man just as much as the preacher,
and the power that emanates from a black garb certainly exists in a blue
one as well. Nor have I anything to say against it; even if you want to
intersperse the seven petitions with seven glasses, what of it? I can't
prove to anybody that beer and religion don't mix well, and perhaps it
will some day get into the liturgy as a new way of taking the Eucharist.
Frankly, I myself, old sinner that I am, am not strong enough to keep
pace with fashion; I cannot catch up worship in the street, as if it
were a cockchafer; for me the chirping of swallows and sparrows cannot
take the place of the organ. If I want to feel my heart exalted, I must
hear the heavy, iron doors of the church close behind me and think to
myself that they are the doors of the world. The dismal high walls with
their narrow windows, that admit but a dim remnant of the bold garish
daylight as if they were sifting it, must surround me on all sides. And
in the distance I must be able to see the charnel-house, with its
death-head cut in the wall. Oh well, better is better.
LEONARD.
You are too particular about it!
ANTONY.
Of course! Of course! And today, as an honest man, I must confess that
what I have been saying did not hold good; for I lost my reverent mood
in church, being annoyed by the vacant seat beside me, and found it
again under the pear-tree in my garden. You are astonished? But look! I
went sadly and dejectedly home, like one whose harvest has been ruined
by hail; for children are like fields--we sow good corn in them and
weeds sprout up. Under the pear-tree, which the caterpillars have half
eaten up, I stood still. "Yes," I thought, "the boy is like this tree,
empty and barren." Then I suddenly imagined that I was very thirsty, and
absolutely had to go over to the tavern. I deceived myself--it wasn't to
get a glass of beer that I wanted to go; it was to seek out the young
man and take him to task in the tavern, where I knew he was sure to be.
I was just about to start, when the sensible old tree let fall a juicy
pear right at my feet, as if to say: Take that for your thirst, and for
slandering me by comparing me with that good-for-nothing son of yours. I
deliberated a moment, took a bite of it, and went into the house.
LEONARD.
Do you know that the apothecary is on the verge of bankruptcy?
ANTONY.
What do I care?
LEONARD.
Don't you care at all
ANTONY.
Surely! I am a Christian--the man has several children!
LEONARD.
And still more creditors. The children, too, are creditors in a way.
ANTONY.
Happy is he who is neither the one nor the other!
LEONARD.
I thought you yourself--
ANTONY.
That was settled up long ago.
LEONARD.
You are a prudent man; of course you immediately demanded your money
when you saw that the green-grocer was about to fail.
ANTONY.
Yes, I need not tremble any more with the fear of losing it--it was lost
long ago!
LEONARD.
You are joking!
ANTONY.
In all seriousness!
CLARA (_looks in at the door_).
Did you call, father?
ANTONY.
Are your ears beginning to ring already? We had not talked about you
yet!
CLARA.
The weekly paper!
LEONARD.
You are a philosopher!
ANTONY.
What do you mean by that?
LEONARD.
You know how to compose yourself.
ANTONY.
I wear a mill-stone as a cravat sometimes, instead of going to the river
with it. That gives one a strong back.
LEONARD.
Let him who can imitate you.
ANTONY.
He who has such a gallant fellow to help him bear it, as I seem to have
found in you, ought to be able to dance under the burden. You have grown
quite pale. I call that sympathy!
LEONARD.
I hope you don't misunderstand me!
ANTONY.
Certainly not!
[_He drums on a dresser._]
That wood is not transparent, is it?
LEONARD.
I do not understand you!
ANTONY.
How foolish it was of our grandfather Adam to take Eve, when she was
naked and destitute, and did not even bring a fig-leaf with her. We two,
you and I, would have scourged her out of Paradise as a tramp! What do
you think?
LEONARD.
You are exasperated with your son.--I have come to you regarding your
daughter--
ANTONY.
You had better be careful!--Perhaps I'll not say no!
LEONARD.
I hope you will not. And I will tell you what I think: The patriarchs
themselves never used to scorn the dowries of their women. Jacob loved
Rachel and courted her seven years, but he also liked the fat rams and
sheep that he earned in her father's service. That, I think, was not to
his discredit, and to outdo him in anything would be to put him to the
blush. I should have liked very much to see your daughter bring a
couple of hundred thalers with her; and that was quite natural, because
she herself would thereby be so much the better off with me. If a girl
brings her bed in her trunk, then she will not have to card wool and
spin yarn. In this case it will not be so, but what of it? We'll make a
Sunday dinner out of Lenten fare, and a Christmas feast out of Sunday's
roast. In that way we'll make out all right!
ANTONY (_offers him his hand_).
You talk well, and God smiles on your words. Well, I will forget that
for fourteen days at tea-time my daughter put a cup on the table for you
in vain. And now that you are to be my son-in-law, I will tell you where
the thousand thalers are!
LEONARD (_aside_).
So they are gone then! Well, I shall not have to go out of my way to
please the old werewolf, even if he is my father-in-law!
ANTONY.
Things went hard with me in my early years. I was no more of a bristly
hedgehog than you when I came into the world, but I have gradually grown
to be one. At first all the quills in my case pointed inward, and people
found pleasure in pricking and pinching my soft smooth skin, and were
amused to see me flinch when the points penetrated into my very heart
and bowels. But the thing did not appeal to me; I turned my skin inside
out and then the quills pricked their fingers and I had peace.
LEONARD (_to himself_).
Safe from the very devil, methinks!
ANTONY.
My father, by not allowing himself any rest day or night, worked himself
to death in his thirtieth year, and my mother nourished me as well as
she could with her spinning. I grew up without learning anything. When I
became larger and was still unable to earn any money, I would gladly
have disaccustomed myself to eating; but when now and then at noon I
would pretend to be sick and push back my plate, what did it mean? It
meant that in the evening my stomach would compel me to announce myself
well again! My greatest grief was that I was so unskilled. I used to
blame myself for it, as if it were my own fault, as if in my mother's
womb I had been supplied with nothing but teeth to eat with, as if I had
purposely left behind me there all the useful capabilities and assets. I
used to blush with shame when the sun shone on me. Just after my
confirmation the man whom they buried yesterday, Master Gebhard, came
into our house. He scowled and made a wry face, as he always used to
frown when he had anything good in mind to do. Then he said to my
mother: "Did you bring your youngster into the world in order to let him
eat the very nose and ears off your head?" I felt ashamed and put the
loaf of bread, from which I was just on the point of cutting off a
piece, back into the cupboard again. My mother took offense at his
well-meant words; she stopped her wheel and replied vehemently that her
son was a fine good fellow. "Well, we will see about that," said the
Master. "If he wants to, he can come right now, just as he stands there,
into my workshop with me. I do not ask any money for teaching him; he
will get his board, and his clothes I will also supply; and if he wants
to get up early and go to bed late, opportunities will not be wanting
for him to earn a little money on the side for his old mother." My
mother began to cry and I to dance. When we finally came to an
agreement, the Master closed up his ears, walked out, and motioned me to
follow. I did not need to put a hat on, for I had none. Without saying
good-by to my mother, I went after him. And on the following Sunday,
when I was allowed to go back to her little room for the first time, he
gave me half a ham to take with me. God's blessing on the good man's
grave! I still hear his half-angry: "Tony, under your coat with it, so
my wife won't see it!"
LEONARD.
You are not crying?
ANTONY (_dries his eyes_).
Yes, I can never think of that without its starting the tears, no matter
how well the source of them may have been stopped up. Oh well, that's
all right! If I should ever get the dropsy, I shall at any rate not have
to draw off these drops too.
[_With a sudden turn._]
What do you think about it?--Supposing on a Sunday afternoon you went
over to smoke a pipe of tobacco with a friend, a friend to whom you owed
everything in the world; and supposing you found him greatly confused
and perturbed, a knife in his hand--the same knife you had used a
thousand times to cut his evening bread--and holding it, covered with
blood, at his neck, and nervously drawing his handkerchief up to his
chin--
LEONARD.
And that is the way old Gebhard went about to the end of his days.
ANTONY.
On account of the scar. And supposing you arrived in time to help save
him, but to do it you had not only to wrench the knife out of his hand
and bandage the wound, but you had also to give over a paltry thousand
thalers that you had saved up; and, furthermore, you had to do it all
absolutely on the sly, so as to induce the sick man to accept it, what
would you do?
LEONARD.
Being a free and single man, without wife and child, I would sacrifice
the money.
ANTONY.
And if you had ten wives, like the Turks, and as many children as were
promised to Father Abraham, and if you took only one second to think
about it, you would be--Well, you are to be my son-in-law! Now you know
where the money is. Today I could tell you, for my old Master is buried;
a month ago I would have kept the secret even on my death-bed. I slipped
the note under the dead man's head before they nailed up the coffin. If
I had known how to write, I would have written underneath: "Honestly
paid!" But, ignorant as I am, there was nothing for me to do but tear
the paper in two. Now he will sleep in peace--and I hope that I shall
too, when they stretch me out beside him.
SCENE VI
MOTHER (_enters hurriedly_).
Do you still know me?
ANTONY (_pointing to the wedding dress_).
The frame, yes--that is perfectly preserved; but the picture--not so
well. It seems to be covered with cobwebs. Oh, well! there has been time
enough for it.
MOTHER.
Have I not a frank husband? Still, I do not need to praise him
specially--frankness is a virtue of married men!
ANTONY.
Are you sorry that you were better gilded at twenty than you are at
fifty?
MOTHER.
Certainly not! If I were, I ought to be ashamed both for myself and for
you!
ANTONY.
Give me a kiss then! I am shaved and look better than usual.
MOTHER.
I say yes, merely to test you, to see if you still understand the art.
It is a long time since such a thing has occurred to you!
ANTONY.
Good mother, I will not ask you to close my eyes; that is a hard thing
to do, and I will take it off your hands. I will do that final service
of love for you. But you must grant me time, understand, to harden and
prepare myself for it, so that I won't make a botch of it. It would have
been much too soon!
MOTHER.
Thank God that we are still going to have a little time together!
ANTONY.
I hope so too! You have your old red cheeks again!
MOTHER.
A comical fellow, our new grave-digger! He was digging a grave this
morning when I passed through the church-yard. I asked him whom it was
for. "For whomsoever God wills," he said. "Perhaps for myself. The same
thing may happen to me that happened to my grandfather; he too had dug
one on chance once, and at night when he came home from the Inn he fell
into it and broke his neck."
LEONARD (_who, up to this time, has been reading the weekly paper_).
The fellow doesn't come from here--he can tell all the lies he likes.
MOTHER.
I asked him: "Why don't you wait until somebody orders a grave dug?" "I
was invited to a wedding today," he said, "and I am enough of a prophet
to know that I would still feel the effects of it in my head tomorrow if
I went. Now of course _some_ body has been inconsiderate enough to go and
die, so that in the morning I would have to get up early and would not
be able to sleep it off."
ANTONY.
"You clown!" I would have said, "supposing now the grave doesn't fit?"
MOTHER.
I said that too, but he shook sharp answers out of his sleeve, as the
devil does fleas. "I took the measurement for Veit, the weaver," he
said, "who, like King Saul, towers a head above everybody else. Now,
come who may, he will not find his house too small; and if it is too
large, that doesn't hurt anybody but me, for, as an honest man, I never
charge for a single foot more than the length of the coffin." I threw my
flowers into the grave and said: "Now it is occupied!"
ANTONY.
I think the fellow was only joking, and even that is sinful enough. To
dig graves in advance is to set the trap of death too soon; the
scoundrel who does it ought to be driven out of the business.
[_To LEONARD, who is still reading._]
What's the news? Is there any philanthropist looking for a poor widow,
who can use a few hundred thalers, or, _vice versa_, a poor widow
looking for a philanthropist who can supply them?
LEONARD.
The police announce the theft of some jewelry. Strange enough! It seems
that, in spite of the hard times, there are still people among us who
can own jewels!
ANTONY.
The theft of some jewelry? Where?
LEONARD.
Over at Wolfram's.
ANTONY.
At--impossible! Carl polished a desk there a few days ago!
LEONARD.
They were taken from a desk. Right!
MOTHER (_to Master_ ANTONY).
May God forgive you for saying that!
ANTONY.
You are right--it was a vile thought!
MOTHER.
To your son you are only half a father! I must tell you that!
ANTONY.
Wife! We'll not discuss that today!
MOTHER.
He is not like you--but is that any reason why he must be bad?
ANTONY.
Then where is he now? The noon hour struck long ago! I'll wager the
dinner is burning and spoiling, because Clara has secret orders not to
set the table until he is here!
MOTHER.
Where do you think he is? At the worst he is only bowling, and he has to
go the longest way about so that you won't see him. Naturally it takes
him a long time to get back!--I cannot see what you have against the
innocent game.
ANTONY.
Against the game? Nothing whatever! Noble men must have some way to pass
the time. Without the king of hearts, the real kings would often find
life tedious; and if bowling balls had not been invented, who knows
whether princes and barons would not be using our heads for the purpose?
But an ordinary workingman cannot do anything worse than spend his
hard-earned money on games. We must respect that which we have
laboriously earned in the sweat of our brows; we must hold it high and
precious, unless we are to lose our bearings and regard all our works
and doings with contempt. How can I strain all my nerves to earn a
thaler which I intend to throw away?
[_The door-bell is heard outside._]
SCENE VII
_Enter_ ADAM, _a Bailiff; another Bailiff._
ADAM (_to Master_ ANTONY).
Now, you just go ahead and pay your wager! No people in red coats with
blue trimmings [_with emphasis_] shall ever enter your house, eh?--Well,
here are two of us!
[_To the other bailiff._]
Why don't you keep your hat on, as I do? Who is going to observe
formalities among people of his own class?
ANTONY.
Your own class? You blackguard!
ADAM.
You are right--we are not among our own class! Scoundrels and thieves
are not of our class! [_Points to the dresser._] Open that up! And then
three steps away--so that you can't sneak anything out of it!
ANTONY.
What? What?
CLARA (_enters with things to set the table_).
Shall I--[_She stops, speechless._]
ADAM (_exhibits a paper_).
Can you read writing?
ANTONY.
Should I be able to do what even my schoolmaster could not do?
ADAM.
Then listen! Your son has stolen some jewelry! We have the thief
already! Now we are here to search the house!
MOTHER (_falls down and dies_).
Oh, God!
CLARA.
Mother! Mother! How her eyes roll!
LEONARD.
I will fetch a doctor!
ANTONY.
Not necessary! That is the last look! I have seen it a hundred times!
Good night, Theresa! You died when you heard it! Let them write that on
your gravestone!
LEONARD.
But perhaps it is [_starts to go_]--awful! But lucky for me!
[_Exit._]
ANTONY (_pulls a bunch of keys from his pocket and throws them down_).
There! Unlock everything! Drawer after drawer! Bring the ax! The key to
the trunk is lost! Ha! Scoundrels and thieves! [_He turns his pockets
inside out._] I find nothing here!
SECOND BAILIFF.
Master Antony, calm yourself! Everybody knows that you are the most
honest man in town!
ANTONY.
So? So?
[_Laughs._]
Yes,
I have used up all the honesty in the family! There, poor boy! There was
none left for him! She too [_points to the dead body_] was much too
virtuous!--Who knows whether or not the daughter--[_Suddenly to CLARA_]
What do you think, my innocent child?
CLARA.
Father!
SECOND BAILIFF (_to ADAM_).
Have you no pity?
ADAM.
Pity? Am I prying into the old fellow's pockets? Am I forcing him to
take off his stockings and turn his shoes inside out? I meant to start
out with doing that--for I hate him like poison, ever since that time in
the tavern when he--you know what I refer to, and you would feel
insulted too, if you had any self respect about you!
[_To CLARA._]
Where is your brother's room?
CLARA (_points_).
Back there!
[_Both Bailiffs, exeunt._]
CLARA.
Father, he is innocent! He must be innocent! He is your son, my brother!
ANTONY.
Innocent, and a matricide?
[_Laughs._]
A MAID (_enters with a letter to CLARA_).
From the cashier, Mr. Leonard.
ANTONY.
You need not read it! He declares himself free of you!
[_Claps his hands._]
Bravo, scoundrel
CLARA (_reads it_).
Yes! Yes! Oh, my God
ANTONY.
Let him go!
CLARA.
Father, father, I cannot--
ANTONY.
You cannot? Cannot? What do you mean? Are you?--
Both BAILIFFS reenter.
ADAM (_spitefully_).
Seek and ye shall find!
SECOND BAILIFF (_to ADAM_).
What do you mean by that? Did it turn out so today?
ADAM.
Hold your tongue!
[_Exeunt both._]
ANTONY.
He is innocent--and you--you--
CLARA.
Father, you are terrible!
ANTONY (_grasps her hand very gently_).
Dear daughter, Carl is only a bungler. He has killed his mother, and
what does it mean? His father remains alive! So, come to his aid--you
cannot ask him to do everything alone. You must make an end of me! The
old trunk still looks rugged, doesn't it? But it has begun to totter
already--it will not cost you much trouble to fell it! You need not
reach for the ax. You have a pretty face--I have never praised you, but
today I will tell you, so that you may acquire courage and confidence.
Your eyes, nose, mouth are surely admired! Become--You understand
me?--Or tell me, I have an idea that you are already--
CLARA (_almost crazy, throws herself with uplifted arms at the feet of
her mother, and cries out like a child_).
Mother! Mother!
ANTONY.
Take your mother's hand and swear to me that you are what you should be!
CLARA.
I--swear--that--I--will--never--bring--disgrace-on--you!
ANTONY.
Good!
[_He puts on his hat._]
It is beautiful weather! We will go out and run the gauntlet! Up the
street! Down the street!
[_Exeunt._]
ACT II
_A Room in the Master Joiner's House._
SCENE I
ANTONY (_rises from the table_).
CLARA (_starts to clear off the dishes_).
ANTONY.
Have you lost your appetite again?
CLARA.
Father, I have had enough.
ANTONY.
But you have taken nothing!
CLARA.
I ate out in the kitchen.
ANTONY.
A bad appetite means a guilty conscience. Oh, well, we shall see--or was
there poison in the soup, as I dreamt yesterday? Perhaps some wild
hemlock got in with the other vegetables by mistake, when they were
gathered?--In that case you did well!
CLARA. Great Heavens!
ANTONY.
Forgive me! I--Away with your pale sad look, which you stole from our
Savior's Mother! One should look ruddy when one is young! There is but
one who might show such a face, and he does not do it! Hey! A box on the
ear for every man who says "ouch!" when he cuts his finger! No man has
any right to do that now, for here stands a man who--ugh!--self-praise
stinks!--But what did I do when our neighbor started to nail down the
cover of your mother's coffin?
CLARA.
You wrenched the hammer away from him and did it yourself, and said:
"This is my masterpiece!" The preceptor, who was just then leading the
choir boys in the dirge over by the door, thought you had gone crazy.
ANTONY.
Crazy?
[_Laughs._]
Crazy. Yes, yes, it is a wise head that cuts itself off at the right
time. Mine must be too firmly fastened on, or else--We squat down in the
world and imagine ourselves sitting behind the stove in a good inn.
Suddenly a light is placed on the table and, behold! we find ourselves
sitting in a den of thieves! There is a bing! bang! on all sides, but no
harm it done--fortunately we have hearts of stone!
CLARA.
Yes, father, so it is.
ANTONY.
What do you know about it? Do you think you have a right to curse with
me because your clerk has deserted you? There will be another to take
you walking Suliday afternoons, another to tell you that your cheeks are
rosy and your eyes blue, and still another to take you as his wife, if
you deserve it! Wait until you have borne the burdens of life in
chastity and honor for thirty years, and have endured sorrow and death
and every human adversity with uncomplaining patience; then let your
son, who ought to stuff a soft pillow for your old head, come and so
overwhelm you with disgrace that you would like to cry out to the earth:
Swallow me, if it does not sicken thee, for I am muddier than thou! Then
you may utter all the curses that I suppress in my bosom, then you may
tear your hair and beat your breasts!--You have that advantage over me,
for you are not a man!
CLARA.
Oh, Carl!
ANTONY.
I wonder what I shall do when I see him again before me, when he comes
home some evening before candlelight with his hair shaved off--for
hair-dressing is not allowed in the penitentiary--and stammers out a
good evening, keeping his hand on the door-knob? I shall do something,
that is certain--but what?
[_Gnashes his teeth._]
And if they keep him locked up for ten years, he shall find me, for I
shall live until then--that much I know! Mark you, Death, what I say:
From now on I am a stone in front of your scythe! It shall fly to pieces
before it shall budge me!
CLARA (_grasps his hand_).
Father, you ought to lie down and rest for half an hour!
ANTONY.
To dream that you are about to be confined? And then to fly into a
passion and seize you, and afterward bethink myself too late and say:
"Dear daughter, I did not know what I was doing!" Thank you! My sleep
has dismissed the magician and employed a prophet, who points out
loathsome things to me with his bloody finger! I don't know how it
is--everything seems possible to me now. Ugh! I shudder at the future as
at a glass of water seen under the microscope--is that the right word,
Mr. Precentor? You have spelled it out for me often enough! I looked
through one once in Nuremburg at the fair, and couldn't drink any more
water all day long. Last night I saw my dear Carl with a pistol in his
hand; when I looked closer into his eyes he pulled the trigger. I heard
a cry, but could see nothing on account of the smoke. When it cleared
away, I saw no shattered skull--but my fine son had in the mean time
come to be a rich man; he was standing and counting gold pieces from one
hand into the other. His face--the Devil take me!--a man could have no
calmer one after working all day and closing the door of his workshop
behind him at night! Well, that's a thing one might prevent! One might
take the law into one's own hands, and afterward present one's self
before the supreme Judge!
CLARA.
Calm yourself!
ANTONY.
Get well again you mean to say! Why am I sick? Yes, doctor, hand me the
drink that shall make me well! Your brother is the worst of sons; be you
the best of daughters! Like a worthless bankrupt I stand before the eyes
of the world! I owed it a fine man to take the place of this weak
invalid, and I cheated it with a scoundrel! Be you such a woman as your
mother was, and then people will say: It does not come from his parents
that the boy went wrong, for the daughter treads the path of
righteousness and excels all others.
[_With terrible coldness._]
And I will do my part in the matter; I will make it easier for you than
it is for others. The moment I see anybody point his fingers at you, I
shall [with a motion toward his neck_] shave myself, and then, I swear
to you, I shall shave off head and all. Then you may say I did it from
fright, because a horse ran away in the street, or because the cat
overturned a chair on the floor, or because a mouse ran up my legs.
Anybody that knows me, to be sure, will shake his head at that, for I
am not easily frightened--but what difference does that make? I could
not endure to live in a world where the people would refrain from
spitting at me simply out of pity.
CLARA.
Merciful God! What shall I do?
ANTONY.
Nothing, nothing, dear child! I am too severe with you--I realize it. Do
nothing--be just as you are, and it is all right. Oh, I have suffered
such rank injustice that I myself must do injustice in order not to
succumb to it when it grips me so hard! Listen! Not long ago I was going
across the street when I met that pock-marked thief, Fritz, whom I had
thrown into jail a few years ago because for the third time he had shown
himself light-fingered in my house. Formerly the scoundrel never even
dared to look at me; now he walked boldly up and offered me his hand. I
felt like boxing his ears, but I bethought myself and did not even spit.
We have been cousins for a week now, and it is proper for relatives to
greet each other! The minister, the sympathetic man who visited me
yesterday, said that no man had anybody to look out for but himself, and
that it was unchristian pride for me to hold myself responsible for the
sins of my son; otherwise Adam would have to take it just as much to
heart as I. Sir, I verily believe that it no longer troubles our first
ancestor in Paradise when one of his descendants begins to rob and
murder.--But did not he himself tear his hair over Cain? No, no, it is
too much! Sometimes I find myself looking around at my shadow to see if
it too has not grown blacker. For I can endure anything and everything,
and have given proof of it, but not disgrace! Put on my back what
burdens you choose, but do not sever the nerve that holds me together!
CLARA.
Father, Carl has not yet confessed anything, and they have found nothing
on him.
ANTONY.
What difference does that make to me? I have gone around the town and
inquired at the different drinking-places about his debts. They amount
to more than he could have earned under me in a quarter of a year even
were he three times as industrious as he is! Now I know why he always
left off work two hours later than I every evening, and why, in spite of
that, he got up before me in the morning. But he soon saw that it all
did no good, or else that it was too much trouble for him and took too
long; so he embraced the opportunity when it presented itself!
CLARA.
You always believe the worst things you can of Carl! You have always
done so! I wonder if you still remember how--
ANTONY.
You talk as your mother would, and I will answer you as I used to answer
her--I will keep quiet!
CLARA.
And supposing Carl is acquitted? Supposing the jewels are found again?
ANTONY.
Then I would employ a lawyer and stake my last shirt to find out whether
or not the burgomaster was justified in throwing the son of an honest
citizen into prison. If he was, then I would submit; for a thing that
can befall anybody I also must accept with resignation. And if to my
misfortune it cost me a thousand times as much as it does others, I
would attribute it to fate. And if God struck me down for it, I would
fold my hands and say: "Lord, Thou knowest why!" If he was not
justified, if it should appear that the man with the gold chain around
his neck acted too hastily, because be thought of nothing except the
fact that the merchant who missed his jewels was his brother-in-law,
then people would find out whether the law has anywhere a gap in it,
whether the king, who doubtless knows that justice is the one demand his
subjects make in return for loyalty and obedience, and who least of all
would wish to remain under obligation to one of the humblest of them,
would allow that gap to remain unfilled. But all this is useless talk!
The boy has no more chance of coming through this trial unscathed, than
your mother has of rising from her grave alive! From him, neither now
nor ever shall I have any consolation! And for that reason do you not
forget what you owe me--keep your oath to me so that I shall not have to
keep mine to you! [_goes out, but returns again._] I shall come home
late tonight, for I am going out in the mountains to the old
lumber-dealer's. He is the only man who still looks me in the eye as he
used to, because he knows nothing of my disgrace. He is deaf; nobody can
tell him anything without yelling himself hoarse, and even then he hears
it all wrong.--So he finds out nothing!
[_Exit._]
SCENE II
CLARA (_alone_).
Oh, God! God! Have pity on me I Have pity on the old man! Take me to
Thee! There is no other way to help him! The sunlight lies like a golden
blanket on the street, and the children try to seize it with their
hands. The birds fly hither and thither, and the flowers and weeds do
not tire of growing higher. Everything is alive, everything wishes to be
alive! Oh, Death! Thousands of sick people are at this moment shuddering
with fear of thee! He who called for thee in the restless night, because
he could no longer endure his sufferings, now finds his bed soft and
downy again. I call upon thee! Spare him whose soul shrinks most
fearsomely from thee, and let him live until the beautiful world
becomes again gray and desolate! Take me in his stead! I shall not
shudder when thou givest me thy cold hand; I shall grasp it and follow
thee more bravely than ever yet a child of God has followed thee!
SCENE III
_Enter the Merchant,_ WOLFRAM.
WOLFRAM.
Good day, Miss Clara! Is your father at home?
CLARA.
He has just gone out.
WOLFRAM.
I have come--my jewels have been found!
CLARA.
Oh, father! Why are you not here?--He has forgotten his
spectacles--there they lie! Oh, if he only notices it and returns for
them!--How then? Where Who had them?
WOLFRAM.
My wife--tell me frankly, Miss: Have you ever heard anything strange
about my wife?
CLARA.
Yes!
WOLFRAM.
That she--[_Points to his brow._] Is that it?
CLARA.
That she is not altogether in her right mind, to be sure!
WOLFRAM (_bursting out_).
My God! My God! All in vain! Not a single
servant that I have ever taken into my house have I allowed to leave me;
to each one I have paid double wages and closed my eyes to all
remissness, in order to buy their silence! And yet--the false,
ungrateful creatures! Oh, my poor children! Only for your sake did I
seek to conceal it!
CLARA.
Do not blame your servants! Surely it is not their fault! Ever since
your neighbor's house burned down, and your wife stood at the open
window laughing and clapping her hands at the fire, yes, and even
puffing out her cheeks and blowing at it, as if she wanted to make it
burn more furiously, people have had to choose between taking her for
the devil himself or for a lunatic. And there were hundreds who saw
that!
WOLFRAM.
That is true. And now, since the whole town knows about my misfortune,
it would be foolish for me to exact a promise of you to keep still about
it! So listen! The theft for which your brother is in prison was
committed by a lunatic!
CLARA.
Your own wife!
WOLFRAM.
That she, who was once the noblest and most sympathetic soul in the
world, has become malicious and mischievous; that she shouts and screams
with joy when an accident happens before her eyes, when a maid breaks a
glass or cuts her finger--I knew that long ago; but that she also takes
things in the house and puts them out of sight, hides money and tears up
papers--that, alas! I found out too late--only this noon! I had laid
myself down on the bed and was just about to fall asleep, when I became
conscious that she had tiptoed noiselessly up beside me, and was
watching me intently to see if I were yet asleep. I closed my eyes
tighter. Then she took the key from the pocket of my vest, which was
hanging over a chair, unlocked my desk, took out a roll of gold pieces,
locked the desk again and put back the key. I was horrified! But I
restrained myself, so as not to disturb her. She went out of the room
and I crept after her on tiptoe. She climbed up to the attic and threw
the gold into an old chest, which has been standing there empty since
the days of my grandfather. Then she glanced timidly around the room,
and, without seeing me, hurried out again. I lighted a taper and
searched the chest; in it I found my youngest daughter's doll, a pair of
the maid's slippers, a ledger, several letters, and, alas! or, God be
praised!--which shall I say?--away down underneath, the jewels!
CLARA.
Oh, my poor mother! It is too terrible!
WOLFRAM.
God knows I would gladly sacrifice the jewelry if, by so doing, I could
undo what has already been done! But the fault is not mine! That my
suspicions, in spite of my profound respect for your father, fell on
your brother, was natural; he had polished the desk, and with him the
jewels had disappeared. I noticed it almost immediately, for I had
occasion to take some papers out of the drawer in which they lay. Still
it did not occur to me to take stringent measures to arrest him
immediately. Merely as a preliminary, I told Adam, the bailiff, about
the matter, and besought him to keep his investigations absolutely
secret. But he would not listen to the idea of sparing anybody; he
declared he must and would bring the case to court at once, for, he
said, your brother was a drunkard and a debt-contractor. And he has,
alas, so much influence with the burgomaster that he can put through
anything he wants to. The man seems to bear a bitter grudge against your
father--I do not know why, but it was impossible to soothe him; he held
his hands over his ears and called out, as he was hurrying away: "If you
had given me the jewelry, it would not have made me as happy as this!"
CLARA.
Once in the tavern the bailiff put his glass down on the table by my
father's and nodded to him as if he wanted to touch glasses with him. My
father then took his away, and said: "People in red coats and blue
trimmings used to have to drink out of glasses with wooden feet. Also
they used to have to wait out in front of the window, or, if it was
raining, by the door, and respectfully remove their hats when the
landlord handed them the drink. Moreover, if they felt a desire to touch
glasses with anybody, they waited until neighbor Hangman happened in."
Oh, God! What is not possible in this world! My mother had to pay for
that with an untimely death!
WOLFRAM.
One should never anger anybody, and least of all bad people! Where is
your father?
CLARA.
In the mountains at the lumber-dealer's.
WOLFRAM.
I'll ride out and hunt him up. I have already been at the burgomaster's,
but unfortunately found him out. Otherwise your brother would be here
now. But the Secretary has already dispatched a messenger! You will see
him before evening! [_Exit._]
SCENE IV
CLARA (_alone_).
Now I should rejoice! Oh, God! And I can think of nothing except: Now it
is you alone! And yet I have a feeling as though something must occur to
me at once that would set everything right again!
SCENE V
_Enter, the_ SECRETARY.
SECRETARY.
Good day!
CLARA (_seizes a chair to keep from falling_).
He! Oh, if only _he_ had not come back!
SECRETARY. Your father is not at home?
CLARA.
No!
SECRETARY.
I bring you good news. Your brother--No, Clara, I cannot talk to you in
this formal way. All these tables, chairs, and cupboards that I know so
well--Good day, old friend!
[_He nods to a cup-board._]
How are you? You have not changed a bit!--around which we used to romp
as children--it seems to me they will put their heads together and
deride me as a fool, unless I quickly assume another tone. I must "thou"
you, as I used to do! If you do not like it, just say to yourself: The
big boy is dreaming, I will awaken him, I will step in front of him and
draw myself up to my full height [_With gestures_], and let him see that
it is no longer a little child that stands before him--[_He points to a
scratch on the door_]--that shows how big you were at eleven!--but a
very proper, grown-up girl, who could reach the sugar when it is upon
the sideboard! Surely you remember! That was the place, the firm
fortress, where it was safe from us even without being locked up. We
used to amuse ourselves by slapping flies, when it stood there, because
we could not endure to see them flying around happily and enjoying what
we ourselves were unable to reach.
CLARA.
I should think people would forget about such things when they had
hundreds and thousands of books to study.
SECRETARY.
Indeed they do forget it! To be sure, what does one not forget over
Justinian and Gaius? Small boys who persistently resist their A B C's
know very well why they do it; they have a presentiment that if they do
not apply themselves too hard to the primer they will never have to
struggle with the Bible. But it is a downright shame! People deceive the
innocent souls! They are shown the red rooster with the basket full of
eggs on the last page, so that of their own accord they say: "Ah!" And
then there is no more holding back; they go tearing down the hill to Z,
and so forth and so forth, until all of a sudden they find themselves in
the midst of the _Corpus Juris_, and are horrified when they realize
what a wilderness the accursed twenty-four letters have enticed them
into--the letters, which, in the beginning, formed themselves, in a
merry dance, only into nice-tasting and nice-smelling words such as
"cherry" and "rose."
CLARA.
And [_Absent-mindedly, and without interest_]--what happens then?
SECRETARY.
That depends upon the difference of temperament. Some work themselves
through. Those usually come forth into daylight again after three or
four years, but looking somewhat thin and pale; however, one must not
blame them for that; I myself am one of that kind. Others lie down in
the middle of the forest; they intend merely to rest themselves, but
they seldom get up again. I myself have a friend who has been drinking
his beer for three years already in the shade of the _Lex Julia_; he
selected the place on account of its name--it recalls pleasant memories.
Still others give up in despair and turn back; those are the stupid
ones; people let them out of one thicket only on condition that they
will run at full speed into another. And then there are some who are
still worse, and who don't get anywhere!
[_To himself._]
How one chatters when one has something in his mind and does not know
how to bring it out!
CLARA.
Everything is bright and cheerful today; that's because it is such
beautiful weather.
SECRETARY.
Yes, in weather like this the owls fall out of their nests, the bats
kill themselves because they feel the devil has created them, the mole
burrows so deep into the earth that he cannot find his way out again and
must pitifully suffocate unless he bores through to the other side and
emerges again in America. Today every ear of corn shoots up twice as
high, and every poppy grows twice as red as usual, even if only out of
shame at not having been so at first. Shall man remain behind? Shall he
defraud the dear Lord of the only reward which His world offers Him--a
happy face and a bright eye, which mirrors and at the same time
transfigures all this gloriousness? Truly, when I see one of these
recluses sneaking out of his door in the morning, his brow furrowed with
wrinkles, and staring at the sky as if it were a vault of
blotting-paper, I often think to myself: It is going to rain soon; God
will have to let down the curtain of clouds, so that that sour face will
not irritate Him. They ought to take legal action against fellows like
that on the ground that they are thwarters of merry parties and
destroyers of harvest weather. How are you going to render thanks for
your life if not by living? Sing joyously, bird, or else you will not
deserve your voice!
CLARA.
Oh, that is true, so true! It almost makes me cry!
SECRETARY.
It was not meant for you. That for eight days you have been breathing
more heavily than you used to, I well understand--I know your father.
But, God be praised! I can make your heart free again, and for that very
purpose I am here. You shall see your brother again this very evening,
and people shall point their fingers, not at him, but at those who cast
him into prison. Does that deserve a kiss, a sisterly kiss, if it cannot
be any other kind? Or shall we play blindman's buff for it?--If I do not
catch you in ten minutes, I am to go away without the kiss and take a
box on the ear into the bargain.
CLARA (_to herself_).
I feel as if I had suddenly grown to be a thousand years old, and time
were standing still with me. I can go neither backwards nor forwards!
Oh, all this brazen sunshine and cheerfulness round about me!
SECRETARY.
You do not answer me. To be sure, I forgot--you are engaged. Oh, girl!
Why did you do that to me? And yet have I any right to complain? She is
like all that is dear and good, and all that is dear and good should
have made me think of her. And yet to me she was for years as if she no
longer existed in the world! For that reason she--If it only were a
fellow before whom one had to cast down one's eyes! But this Leonard--
CLARA (_suddenly, when she hears the name_).
I must go to him. That is just it--I am no longer the sister of a
thief!--Oh, God! what shall I do? Leonard will, he must! He needs only
not to be a fiend! Everything will be as it used to be [_Shudders_]--as
it used to be!
[_To the SECRETARY._]
Do not be offended, Frederick!--Why are my legs so heavy all of a
sudden?
SECRETARY.
You will--
CLARA.
To Leonard! Where else should I go? Only that one road lies before me in
this world!
SECRETARY.
You love him, then! Well--
CLARA (_wildly_).
Love him? It is either he or death! Does anybody wonder that I choose
him? I would not do it had I only myself to consider!
SECRETARY.
He or death? Girl, thus speaks Despair, or--
CLARA.
Do not make me frantic! Do not mention that word again! You! It is you I
love! There! I cry it out to you as if I were already wandering on the
other side of the grave, where no one blushes any more, where cold and
naked forms glide past one another, because the fearful, holy presence
of God has entirely consumed in every one all thought of others.
SECRETARY.
Me? Still me? Clara, I divined it when I saw you out in the garden.
CLARA.
Did you? Oh, the other too!
[_Gloomily, as if she were alone._]
He stepped up in front of me--he or I!--Oh, my heart, my accursed heart!
In order to prove to him, prove to myself, that it was not so, or to
stifle it if it were so, I did what now [_Breaks out into tears_]--God
in Heaven! I would have pity on myself, were I Thou, and Thou I!
SECRETARY.
Clara, be my wife! I came to look once more into your eyes in the old
way. Had you not understood the look I should have gone away again
without speaking. Everything that I am and have I now offer to you. It
is little, but it may grow to be more. I should have been here long ago,
but your mother was sick, and then she died.
[Illustration: Alfred Rethel DEATH PLAYING THE FINALE]
CLARA (_laughs crazily_).
SECRETARY.
Take courage, girl! The fellow has your word--that worries you. And, to
be sure, it is a damnable thing! How could you--
CLARA.
Oh, ask me everything that conspires to drive a poor girl crazy! Scorn
and derision from all sides when you went to the University, and did not
let me hear from you.--"She still thinks of him!" "She thinks that
child's play was meant seriously!" "Does she receive any letters from
him?"--And then, too, my mother: "Stay with people of your class!"
"Pride never succeeds!" "Leonard is a very nice fellow; everybody is
surprised that you look at him over your shoulder so!" And added to all
the rest, my own heart: "If he has forgotten you, show him that you
too--" Oh, God!
SECRETARY.
I am to blame. I realize it. Well, what is difficult is not necessarily
impossible. I will get him to release you. Perhaps--
CLARA.
Release me? There!
[_Throws LEONARD'S letter to him._]
SECRETARY (_reads_).
As cashier, I--your brother--thief--very sorry--but out of consideration
for my office, I cannot help it--[_To CLARA._] He wrote you that on the
very day your mother died? For he adds his condolence on her sudden
death!
CLARA.
I suppose so!
SECRETARY.
The Devil take him! Great God, the cats, snakes and other monsters
which, so to speak, slipped through Thy fingers at Creation, so
delighted Beelzebub that he imitated Thy patterns--but he finished them
off better than Thou didst; he put them in a human skin, and now they
stand in rank and file with the rest of Thy humanity, and one does not
recognize them until they begin to scratch and sting!
[_To CLARA._]
But it is well, indeed it is fine!
[_He tries to embrace her._]
Come! Forever! With this kiss--
CLARA (_sinks into his arms_).
No, not forever! Only to keep me from falling--but no kiss!
SECRETARY.
Girl, you do not love him, you have your release--
CLARA (_gloomily, straightening herself up again_).
And yet I must go to him, I must throw myself on my knees before him and
cry out: "Behold my father's white hairs! Take me!"
SECRETARY.
Unhappy girl! Do I understand you?
CLARA.
Yes!
SECRETARY.
No man can overlook that! Think of having to cast down one's eyes before
a man into whose face one would like to spit!
[_He presses CLARA wildly to him._]
Poor, poor girl!
CLARA.
Go now, go!
SECRETARY (_to himself, brooding_).
Or else one would have to shoot the dog who knows of it. Oh, that he had
some courage about him! That he would stand up and fight! That one could
force him to it! I should not be afraid of missing him!
CLARA.
I beg of you!
SECRETARY (_going_).
As soon as it grows dark!
[_He returns and grasps CLARA's hand._]
Girl, you stand before me--[_He turns away._]
Thousands of your sex would have kept it a secret with shrewd cunning,
and only in an hour of sweet forgetfulness would have confided it
coaxingly to the ear and soul of their husbands. I feel what I owe you!
CLARA (_alone_).
Oh, my heart, lock yourself up! Crush yourself together so that not
another drop of that blood may escape which would kindle again the
congealing life in my veins! For a moment a feeling akin to hope arose
in you again! Now for the first time I am conscious of it!
[_Laughs._]
No! No man can, overlook that! And if--could you yourself overlook it?
Would you have had the courage to grasp a hand that--No! no! Such evil
courage you would not have! You would with your own hands have to lock
yourself into your hell, if any one tried to open the door from the
outside. You are forever--Oh, alas, that the pain is intermittent, that
the piercing agony sometimes ceases! That is the reason why it lasts so
long! The tortured man imagines he is resting when the torturer merely
pauses to get his breath. It is like a drowning man's catching his
breath on the waves, when the current that has drawn him under spews him
forth again only to seize him once more and draw him down. He has
nothing but a double, futile fight for life!--
Well, Clara?--Yes, father, I am going! Your daughter will not drive you
to self-destruction! Soon I shall be the wife of that man, or--God! No!
I do not go begging for happiness--it is misery, the deepest misery that
I beg for! You will give me my misery!--Away! Where is the letter?
[_She takes it._]
Three wells you pass on your way to him! You must not halt at any of
them, Clara--you have not yet the right to do that!
[_Exit._]
ACT III
SCENE I
_LEONARD'S Room._
LEONARD (_at a table covered with documents, writing_).
That makes the sixth sheet since dinner! How good a man feels when he is
doing his duty! Now anybody that wanted to could come through the door,
even the king himself! I should rise, but I should not feel embarrassed!
I make just one exception--that is the old joiner! But, after all, he
cannot do much to me! Poor Clara! I am sorry for her. I cannot think of
her without uneasiness! If only it were not for that one cursed evening!
It was really more jealousy than love that made me so frantic, and she
must have yielded to me only to silence my reproaches--for she was as
cold as death toward me! She has some bad days ahead of her! Oh, well, I
too shall suffer considerable annoyance! Let everybody bear his own
burden! Above all things I must make the affair with the little humpback
secure, so that she cannot escape me when the storm breaks out! Then I
shall have the burgomaster on my side, and shall have nothing to fear!
SCENE II
_Enter, CLARA._
CLARA.
Good evening, Leonard!
LEONARD.
Clara! [_To himself._]
This is something I did not expect!
[_Aloud._]
Did you not receive my letter? Surely--Perhaps you are coming for your
father to pay the taxes! How much is it?
[_He fumbles in a ledger._]
I really ought to have it in my head!
CLARA.
I have come to give back your letter! Read it again!
LEONARD (_reads it with great seriousness_).
It is a perfectly sensible letter! How can a man who has public money in
trust marry into a family to which [_he swallows a word_]--to which your
brother belongs?
CLARA.
Leonard!
LEONARD.
But perhaps the whole town is mistaken! Your brother is not in prison?
He never was in prison? You are not the sister of a--of your brother?
CLARA.
Leonard, I am my father's daughter! Not as the sister of an accused,
innocent man, who has been set free--for my brother is at liberty--not
as a girl who trembles before undeserved disgrace, for [_in a low
voice_] I tremble still more before you, only as the daughter of the old
man who gave me life, do I stand here!
LEONARD.
And you wish?--
CLARA.
Can you ask? Oh, that I might go away! My father will cut his throat,
unless--Marry me!
LEONARD.
Your father--
CLARA.
He has sworn it! Marry me!
LEONARD.
Hand and neck are near cousins--they never do harm to each other! Don't
be anxious!
CLARA.
He has sworn it! Marry me! And, afterward, kill me! I will thank you
even more for the latter than for the former!
LEONARD.
Do you love me? Did your heart prompt you to come here? Am I the man
without whom you cannot live and die?
CLARA.
Answer that yourself!
LEONARD.
Can you swear that you love me? That you love me as a girl loves a man
to whom she is to bind herself forever?
CLARA.
No, that I cannot swear! But this I can swear Whether I love you or do
not love you, that you shall never know! I will wait on you, I will work
for you, you need give me nothing to eat, I will support myself, I will
do sewing and spinning for other people at night, I will go hungry when
I have nothing to do, I will rather bite a piece out of my own arm than
go to my father and let him suspect anything! When you beat me, because
your dog is not at hand, or because you have kicked him out, I will
rather swallow my own tongue than emit a cry which will betray to the
neighbors what is going on. I cannot promise that my skin will not show
the welts caused by your whip, for that is not in my power. But I will
lie about it, I will say that I fell head foremost against the cupboard,
or that I slipped on the floor because it was too smooth--that I will do
before anybody has time to ask me where the black and blue marks came
from!--Marry me! I shall not live long! And if it lasts too long for
you, if you do not care to meet the expenses of the divorce proceedings
necessary to get rid of me, them buy some poison of the apothecary and
put it somewhere as if it were for your rats. I will take it without
your even nodding to me, and tell the neighbors with my dying breath
that I took it for pulverized sugar!
LEANARD.
A man of whom you expect all this will certainly not surprise you if he
says no!
CLARA.
Then may God not frown too severely on me if I come before he calls me!
If I had myself alone to consider I would endure it patiently. If the
world kicked me in my misery, instead of standing by me, I would bear it
submissively and regard it as just punishment for I know not what! I
would love my child, even if it had your features, and I would cry so
much before the poor innocent thing that, when it grew older and wiser,
it would certainly not despise and curse its mother. But it is not
myself alone; and on Judgement Day I shall much more easily find an
answer to the Judge's question: why did you drive your father to it?
LEANARD.
You talk as if you were the first woman and the last to find herself in
your predicament! Thousands have gone through it before you and
submitted to their fate. Thousands after you will be confronted with the
same situation and accept their fate. Are all these others strumpets,
that you are so anxious to stand in the corner by yourself? They also
had fathers who invented a score of new oaths when they first heard of
it, and talked about murder and homicide! Afterward they were ashamed of
themselves and repented their oaths and blasphemies; they sat down and
rocked the child, or fanned the flies away!
CLARA.
I readily believe that you fail to understand why anybody in the world
should keep an oath.
SCENE III
_Enter a boy_
BOY.
Here are some flowers! I am not to say from whom they come!
LEANARD.
Oh, what pretty flowers!
[_He beats his brow._]
The devil! How stupid of me! I should have sent Some! How can I get out
of it? I do not understand such things, and the little girl will take it
to heart! She has nothing else to think about!
[_He takes the flowers._]
But I shall not keep all of them.
[_To_ Clara] How about it? These here signify repentance and shame,
don't they? Did you not say that to me once?
CLARA (_nods_.)
LEANARD (_To the boy_).
See here, boy, these are for me. I fasten them on me here, you
see--where my heart is. These, these dark red ones, which burn like a
dismal fire, you may take back. Do you understand? As soon as my apples
are ripe, you may come for some!
BOY.
That is a long time off!
[_Exit_.]
SCENE IV
LEANARD.
Yes, you see, Clara; you spoke about keeping one's word. Just because I
am a man of my word I must answer you again as I have already answered
once before. A week ago I wrote you a letter--you cannot deny it--there
it lies! [_He hands her the letter, which she takes mechanically_.] I
had reason--your brother--you say he is acquitted--I am glad of that!
But during these eight days I have entered into a new relation. I had a
right to do it, for you did not protest against my letter at the right
time! I was free in my own conscience, as well as before the law. Now
you come to me--but I have already given my promise and received
another's! [_To himself._] I would it were so!--The other girl is
already in the same predicament as you are! I am sorry for you, but [_He
strokes her hair, and she permits it, as if she were absolutely
unconscious of it_]--you understand?--One cannot trifle with the
burgomaster!
CLARA (_absent-mindedly_).
Trifle with him!
LEONARD.
See! You are getting sensible! And as far as your father is concerned,
you can say it boldly to his face that he alone is to blame. Do not
stare at me so; do not shake your head! It is so, girl, it is so! Just
tell him that! He'll understand it all right, and repent! I'll vouch
for that! [_To himself._] Any man who gives away his daughter's dowry
must not be surprised if she remains an old maid. When I think of that
my back gets stiff, and I could wish that the old fellow were here to
receive a lecture. Why must I be such a monster?--Only because he was a
fool! Whatever happens as a result of that, he is to blame for it! That
is obvious!
[_To CLARA._]
Or would you prefer to have me talk with him myself? For your sake I
will risk a black eye and go to him. He may be rough with me, he may
throw the boot-jack at my head, but he will have to swallow the truth in
spite of the stomach-ache it gives him, and let you rest in peace!--Is
he at home?
CLARA (_stands up straight_).
I thank you!
[_Starts to go._]
LEONARD.
Shall I go over with you? I have the courage!
CLARA.
I thank you as I would thank a serpent which had wound itself around me
and unwound itself and sprung away again, because another prey enticed
it. I know that I have been bitten, I know that it deserts me only
because it does not seem worth the trouble to suck out what little
marrow there is left in my bones. But still I thank the snake, for now I
shall have a quiet death. Yes, man, I am not mocking; to me it is as if
I had seen through your breast down into the abyss of hell, and whatever
may be my lot in the awful eternity to come, I shall never have anything
more to do with you, and that is a consolation! And just as the
unfortunate person whom a viper has stung cannot be blamed for opening
his veins in terror and disgust, in order that his poisoned blood may
stream swiftly forth, so perhaps God in His everlasting mercy will take
pity on me when He looks down upon you and me and sees what you have
made of me! For how _could_ I do it, when I never, never _should_ have
done it?--One thing more: My father knows nothing, he does not even
suspect anything! And that he may never find out I shall quit the world
this very day! If I thought for one moment that you [_she takes a step,
wildly, toward him_]--oh, but that is foolishness! You would be only all
the better pleased to see them all stand and shake their heads and
inquire in vain of one another why it happened!
LEONARD.
Things will happen--what is one to do, Clara?
CLARA.
Away from here! The man can talk!
[_She starts to go._]
LEONARD.
Do you think that I believe you?
CLARA.
No!
LEONARD.
Thank God, you cannot be a suicide without being an infanticide as well!
CLARA.
Better both than a parricide! Oh, I know that one cannot atone for one
sin with another! But what I now do affects me alone! If I hand the
knife to my father the blow strikes him as well as me! It strikes me in
any case! That gives me courage and strength in all my distress! Things
will go well with you on earth!
[_Exit._]
SCENE V
LEONARD (_alone_).
"I must, I must marry her!" And why must I? She is going to do a crazy
thing in order to keep her father from doing one. Where lies the
necessity of my doing a still crazier thing in order to ward off hers? I
cannot admit the necessity--at least not until I see before me the man
who wants to get ahead of me with the most insane act of all! And if he
thinks as I do about it there will be no end! That sounds quite
sensible, and yet--I must follow her! Here comes somebody! Thank
God!--Nothing is more ignominious than to have to be at variance with
one's own thoughts! A rebellion in the head, in which one brings forth
viper after viper and each one tries to eat the other or bite his tail,
is the worst of all!
SCENE VI
_Enter the SECRETARY._
SECRETARY.
Good evening!
LEONARD.
Mr. Secretary? To what do I owe the honor--
SECRETARY.
Leonard, you will see at once!
LEONARD.
You say Leonard to me?--To be sure, we used to be schoolmates!
SECRETARY.
And we may perhaps be death-mates too!
[_He draws forth two pistols._]
Do you know how to handle these?
LEONARD.
I do not understand you!
SECRETARY (_cocks one of them_).
Do you see?--This is how it is done! Then you aim at me, as I am now
doing at you, and pull the trigger! So!
LEONARD.
What are you talking about?
SECRETARY.
One of us two must die! Die! And immediately!
LEONARD.
Die?
SECRETARY.
You know why!
LEONARD.
By God, no!
SECRETARY.
No matter--it will occur to you all right when you are dying!
LEONARD.
I have no idea--
SECRETARY.
Bethink yourself! Otherwise I might take you for a mad dog that has
unwittingly bitten the one I love most on earth, and shoot you down as
such! But for half an hour more I must let you pass as my equal!
LEONARD.
But don't talk so loud! If anybody should hear you--
SECRETARY.
If anybody could hear me you would have called him long ago! Well?
LEONARD.
If it is about the girl--I can marry her, you know! I had, in fact, half
made up my mind to do it, when she herself was here!
SECRETARY.
She was here! And has gone away again without having seen you contrite
and repentant at her feet? Come! Come!
LEONARD.
I beg of you! You see before you a man who is ready to do anything that
you dictate. This very evening I will betroth myself to her.
SECRETARY.
That I shall do, no one else. If the world itself hung on it you should
not even touch the hem of her dress again! Come! Into the woods with me!
But mark this! I shall take you by the arm, and if on the way you emit a
single cry--[_He holds up a pistol._] I trust you believe me!
Nevertheless, that you may not feel tempted, we will take the road
through the garden behind the house!
LEONARD.
One of them is for me--give it to me!
SECRETARY.
So that you can throw it away and compel me to murder you or let you
escape! Is that why you want it? Be patient, until we are on the spot!
Then I shall divide with you honestly!
LEONARD (_goes, and accidentally knocks his drinking-glass from the
table_).
Shall I never take another drink?
SECRETARY.
Courage, my lad! Perhaps it will go well with you! God and the devil
seem to be forever fighting for the world! Who knows which is master
just now?
[_Seizes him by the arm; exeunt both._]
SCENE VII
_A Room in the Joiner's House; enter CARL._
CARL.
Nobody at home! Had I not known about the rat-hole under the threshold
where they always hide the key when they all go out, I could not have
got in! Well, that would not have made any difference! I could run
around the city twenty times now and imagine to myself that there was no
greater pleasure in the world than that of using one's legs! Let's have
a light!
[_He strikes a light._]
I'll bet the tinder-box is in the same old place, for we have twice ten
commandments in this house! The hat belongs on the third nail, not on
the fourth! At half past nine one has to be tired! Before Martinmas one
must not shiver; after Martinmas one must not sweat! That stands on a
line with: Thou shalt love and fear God! I am thirsty!
[_Calls._]
Mother! Fie! As if I had forgotten that she lies where even the
innkeeper's boots no longer has to open his nut-cracker mouth with a
"Yes, sir!" when he is called! I did not weep when I heard the funeral
bell in my dark cell, but--Redcoat, you would not even let me roll the
last ball at the bowling alley, although I already had it in my hand.
Well, I shall not leave you time for a last breath when I meet you
alone, and that may happen this very evening! I know where you are to be
found about ten o'clock! Afterward, aboard ship!--I wonder where Clara
is? I am as hungry as I am thirsty! Today is Thursday--they have veal
broth for dinner. If it were winter, they would have had cabbage--before
Shrove-Tuesday white cabbage--after Shrove-Tuesday, green cabbage! That
is as fixed as Thursday's having to come when Wednesday has passed, so
that it cannot say to Friday: You go in my place--my feet are sore!
SCENE VIII
_Enter, CLARA._
CARL.
At last!--You should not kiss so much! Whenever four red lips meet a
bridge for the devil is built!--What have you there?
CLARA.
Where? What?
CARL.
Where? What?--In your hand!
CLARA.
Nothing!
CARL.
Nothing? Is it a secret?
[_He snatches LEONARD'S letter._]
Give me that! When the father is not here the brother is guardian!
CLARA.
I held fast to the scrap of paper, and yet the evening wind is so strong
that it blows the tiles off the roofs. As I was passing the church one
fell right in front of me, so that my foot struck against it. Oh, God! I
thought--one more! And I stood still. That would have been fine; they
would have buried me and said: "She met with an accident!"--But I waited
in vain for the second.
CARL (_has read the letter_).
Thunder and--I'll lame the hand that wrote that!--Bring me a bottle of
wine! Or is your savings box empty?
CLARA.
There is one more in the house. I had bought it secretly for mother's
birthday and put it aside. Tomorrow would have been the day--[_She turns
away._]
CARL.
Give it to me!
CLARA (_brings the wine_).
CARL (_drinks quickly_).
Now we can start in again--planing, sawing,
hammering, and, in between, eating, drinking, and sleeping, so that we
can go on planing, sawing, and hammering, and on Sundays do a bit of
praying into the bargain! I thank Thee, O Lord, that I may plane, saw,
and hammer!
[_Drinks._]
Long live every good dog that is tied to a chain, and yet does not snap
at everything around him!
[_He drinks again._]
And once more: Here's to his health!
CLARA.
Carl, do not drink so much! Father says the devil lurks in wine!
CARL.
And the priest says God lurks in wine! [_He drinks._] Let us see who is
right! The bailiff was here at the house--how did he behave himself?
CLARA.
As if he had been in a den of thieves. No sooner had he opened his mouth
than mother fell over and was dead!
CARL.
Good! If you hear tomorrow that the fellow has been found dead, then do
not curse the murderer!
CLARA.
Surely you are not going to--
CARL.
Am I his only enemy? Has he not been often attacked already? Among so
many it might be difficult to find the right man to attribute the deed
to, unless he left his cane or hat on the spot! [_He drinks._] Whoever
it is: Good success to him!
CLARA.
Brother, you talk--
CARL.
Don't you like it? Never mind! You will not see me very much longer!
CLARA (_shudders with terror_).
No!
CARL.
No? So you know already that I am going to sea? Do my thoughts crawl
around on my forehead, that you can read them so easily? Or did the old
man fly into a passion in his old way and threaten to shut me out of the
house? Bah! That would be very much the same thing as if the jailer had
sworn to me: You shall not stay in prison any longer--I am going to
shove you out into the open again!
CLARA.
You do not understand me!
CARL (_sings_).
A ship lies in the offing,
A-sporting with the winds.
Yes indeed, there is nothing to bind me to the bench here any longer!
Mother is dead, there is no longer any one to stop eating fish after
every storm, and that has been my wish from boyhood. Away! I shall not
prosper here--at least not until I know for sure that luck no longer
favors the brave fellow who stakes his life on the game, who throws back
onto the table the copper coin that he has received from the great
treasure, in order to see whether luck will pocket it or return it to
him gilded!
CLARA.
And are you going away to leave your father all alone? He is sixty years
old!
CARL.
Alone? Aren't you going to be left?
CLARA.
I?
CARL.
You! His pet child! What sort of weeds are growing in your head
that you ask me that? By going, I leave his joy with him and free him of
his everlasting annoyance! Why shouldn't I do it? Once and for all we
cannot get along together. He can't get things contracted enough to suit
him. He would like to close his fist and creep inside it. I would like
to strip off my skin like a baby's coat--if it were only practicable!
[_Sings_]
The anchor they are heaving,
I trow they'll soon be leaving,
Now look! Away she spins.
Tell me yourself: Did he doubt my guilt for a single instant? And did he
not find the usual consolation in his over-wise: "Just as I expected!"
"I have always thought so!" "It could not end in any other way!" If it
had been you, he would have killed himself! I should like to see him if
you were to suffer a woman's fate! It would be to him as if he himself
had become pregnant--and by the devil besides!
CLARA.
Oh, what anguish! Yes, I must go! Away!
CARL.
What do you mean by that?
CLARA.
I must go into the kitchen! What else should I mean?
[_Clasping her forehead._]
Yes! That too! Just to hear that I came home again!
[_Exit._]
CARL.
She acts very strangely!
[_Sings_]
A bold and saucy sea-gull
Sweeps round, as if possessed--
CLARA. [_Reënters._]
The last thing is done! Father's supper is on the fire! As I closed the
kitchen door behind me, I thought to myself: You are never to enter
there again! I shuddered in my very soul! Thus I shall go out of the
room too, thus out of the house, thus out of the world!
CARL. [_Sings; he continues to walk back and forth; CLARA remains in the
background._]
Aloft the sun is burning,
The fishes, glancing, turning,
Circle about their guest.
CLARA.
Why do I not do it then? Shall I never do it? Am I going to continue
putting it off from day to day, as I am now doing from one minute to the
next, until--certainly! Then, away! Away! And yet I stand still! I have
a feeling as if imploring hands were raised in my womb, as if
eyes--[_She sits down on a chair._] What does it mean? Am I too weak to
do it? Then ask yourself if you are strong enough to see your father
with his throat cut!--[_She rises._] No! No!--Our Father, Who art in
Heaven, hallowed be Thy name--God! God! My poor head! I cannot even
pray! Brother! Brother! Help me!
CARL.
What's the matter with you
CLARA.
The Lord's Prayer!
[_She bethinks herself._]
It seemed to me as if I were already lying in the water and sinking, and
had not yet prayed! I [_suddenly_]--Forgive us our trespasses, as we
forgive those that trespass against us! That is it! Yes! Yes! Certainly
I forgive him! I shall think no more of him!--Good night, Carl!
CARL.
Are you going to bed so soon? Good night!
CLARA. [_Like a child, repeating the Lord's Prayer._]
Forgive us--
CARL.
You might bring me a glass of water first--but it must be absolutely
fresh!
CLARA (_quickly_).
I will bring it to you from the well!
CARL.
All right! If you want to. It is not far, you know.
CLARA.
Thank you! Thank you! That was the last thing that still troubled me!
The deed itself would have betrayed me! Now people will say: She had an
accident! She fell in!
CARL.
Be careful of yourself! The board has probably not been nailed down
yet!
CLARA.
It is bright moonlight!--Oh, God, I am coming only because otherwise my
father would come! Forgive me, as I--have mercy on me--mercy--[_Exit._]
SCENE IX
CARL (_sings_).
I fain would be aboard her,
My kingdom's on the sea.
Yes, but first [_He looks at the clock._]--What time is it?--Nine
o'clock.
A lad that's young and growing
Must e'en be up and going,
No matter where, says he.
SCENE X
_Enter, Master ANTONY._
ANTONY.
I should have an apology to make to you, but if I forgive you for
contracting secret debts and pay them off for you into the bargain, you
will probably allow me to omit the apology?
CARL.
The one is good, the other is not necessary. As soon as I sell my
Sunday clothes I shall myself be able to satisfy the people who have a
claim of a few thalers against me. And that I shall do tomorrow, for as
a sailor [_To himself_]--There, it is out! [_Aloud_]--I shall no longer
need them!
ANTONY.
What kind of talk is that again?
CARL.
This is not the first time you have heard it, but today you may answer
me as you will! My mind is made up!
ANTONY.
You are of age, that is true!
CARL.
And just because I am of age I am not defiant about it! For in my
opinion birds and fishes should not quarrel over the question whether it
is better in the water or in the air. Just one thing--either you will
never see me again, or else you will clap me on the shoulder and say:
Well done!
ANTONY.
We'll wait and see! I shall not have to pay off the fellow that I have
taken on in your place. That's all.
CARL.
I thank you.
ANTONY.
Tell me: Did the bailiff, instead of taking you by the shortest way to
the burgomaster, really lead you around through the whole town and--
CARL.
Up the street, down the street, across the marketplace like a carnival
ox! But do not doubt it--I shall settle up with him too before I go!
ANTONY.
I do not blame you for that, but I forbid you to do it! CARL.
Ho!
ANTONY.
I'll not let you out of my sight! I myself would run to the man's aid,
if you tried to attack him!
CARL.
I thought that you loved my mother too!
ANTONY.
I shall prove it!
SCENE XI
SECRETARY (_staggers in; he is pale, and is holding a handkerchief
against his breast_). Where is Clara? [_He falls into a chair_.]
God!--Good evening! Thank Heaven that I had time to get here!--Where is
she?
CARL.
She went to--Where is she? Her talk--I am afraid--[_Exit_.]
[Illustration: DEATH AS FRIEND _From a Drawing by Alfred Rethel_]
SECRETARY.
She is avenged! The scoundrel is done for! But I too am--Oh, why did it
have to be?--God! Now I cannot--
ANTONY.
What's the matter with you? What ails you?
SECRETARY.
It is nearly up with me! Give me your hand on it, that you will not cast
off your daughter--do you hear?--will not cast her off, if she--
ANTONY.
That is strange talk! Why should I, pray--Ha! My eyes are opening!--Was
I right after all in suspecting?--
SECRETARY.
Give me your hand!
ANTONY.
No!
[_He puts both hands into his pockets._]
But I will clear the way for her--she knows that! I have told her so.
SECRETARY (_horrified_).
You told her!--unhappy girl! Now for the first time I quite understand--
CARL (_rushes in_).
Father! Father! There is somebody lying in the well! If only it is not--
ANTONY.
The long ladder! Hooks! Ropes! Why do you delay? Quick! Even were it the
bailiff!
CARL.
Everything is already there! The neighbors arrived before me! If only it
is not Clara!--
ANTONY.
Clara?
[_He grasps the table._]
CARL.
She went to draw water, and they found her handkerchief!
SECRETARY.
Scoundrel, I know now why your bullet hit the mark! It is she!
ANTONY.
Go and find out!
[_He, sits down._]
I cannot!
[_Exit CARL._]
And yet--
[_Rises again._]
If [_to the SECRETARY_] I understood you correctly, everything is all
right!
CARL (_reënters_).
Clara! Dead! Her head terribly crushed on the edge of the well, as
she--Father, she did not fall in, she jumped in! A maid saw her!
ANTONY.
Let her think before she speaks! It is not light enough for her to have
distinguished things with certainty! SECRETARY. Do you doubt it? You
would like to, but you cannot! Think only of what you said to her! You
pointed out to her the road to death! I, I alone am to blame that she
did not turn back! When you suspected her misery, you thought only of
the tongues that would hiss at you, but not of the worthlessness of the
snakes to which they belonged! Then you uttered a word that drove her to
despair! And I, instead of catching her in my arms when her heart was
bursting with nameless anguish before me, thought only of the scoundrel
who could make light of it. And now I pay with my life for having made
myself so dependent upon a man who was worse than I! And you too, who
stand there so stolidly, you too will say one day: Daughter, I would to
God you had not spared me the head-shaking and shoulder-shrugging of the
Pharisees about me! It crushes me more deeply that you cannot sit by my
death-bed and wipe the sweat of anguish from my brow!
ANTONY.
She spared me nothing! People have seen it!
SECRETARY.
She did the best she could! You did not deserve to have her act succeed!
ANTONY.
Or she did not!
[_Tumult outside._]
CARL. They are coming with her!
[_Starts to go._]
ANTONY (_immovable, as to the end; calls after him_).
Into the back room, where your mother stood!
SECRETARY.
Away to meet her!
[_He attempts to rise, but falls back._]
Oh, Carl!
CARL (_helps him up and leads him away_).
ANTONY.
I no longer understand the world!
[_Stands brooding._]
* * * * *
SIEGFRIED'S DEATH
A TRAGEDY IN FIVE ACTS
By FRIEDRICH HEBBEL
DRAMATIS PERSONÆ
KING GUNTHER
HAGEN TRONJE
DANK WART
VOLKER
GISELHER
GERENOT
WULF _Warrior_
TRUCES _Warrior_
RUMOLT
SIEGFRIED
UTE
KRIEMHILD
BRUNHILDA, _Queen of Iceland_
FRIGGA, _her nurse_
A CHAPLAIN
A CHAMBERLAIN
_Warriors, Populace, Maidens, Dwarfs_
SIEGFRIED'S DEATH (1862)
TRANSLATED BY KATHARINE ROYCE
ACT I
_Iceland, BRUNHILDA'S castle. Early morning._
SCENE I
_Enter BRUNHILDA and FRIGGA from opposite sides._
BRUNHILDA.
From whence so early? Dewy is thy hair
And blood-stained are thy garments.
FRIGGA.
I have made
A sacrifice unto the ancient gods,
Before the moon was gone.
BRUNHILDA.
The ancient gods!
The cross rules now, and Thor and Odin dwell
As devils in deep hell.
FRIGGA.
And dost thou fear
Them less for that? Their curses still may fall
Upon us, though their blessings are withheld,
And willingly I sacrificed the ram.
Oh, wouldst thou kill one too! Thy need is great
Above all others.
BRUNHILDA.
Mine?
FRIGGA.
Another time.
I long had meant to tell thee, and today
At last the hour has come.
BRUNHILDA.
I've always thought
That at thy death the hour would come to me,
So did not importune thee.
FRIGGA.
Mark me now!
From our volcano came there suddenly
An aged man and left with me a child,
A tablet, too, with runes.
[Illustration: Peter Cornelius Title Page of the Nibelungenlied]
BRUNHILDA.
'Twas in the night?
FRIGGA.
How dost thou know?
BRUNHILDA.
When on thee falls the moonlight--On
thy face, thou speakest oft aloud,
Betraying much.
FRIGGA.
And thou didst harken to me?
At midnight we were watching with our dead--Our
beauteous Queen. The old man's hair was white,
And longer than a woman's. Like a cloak
It hung about him, flowing softly down.
BRUNHILDA.
The spirit of the mountain!
FRIGGA.
Naught know I!--
No syllable he spoke. The little maid
Reached forth her hands and grasped the golden crown
That glittered brightly o'er the dead Queen's brow.
We marveled that it fitted her.
BRUNHILDA.
The child?
FRIGGA.
The little maid; and it was none too large,
Nor later did it bind her.
BRUNHILDA.
'Twas like mine!
FRIGGA.
Like thine it was! And, yet more wonderful.
The child was like the maid that lay there dead
Within the mother's arms and disappeared
As had it ne'er existed--yes, so like
That only by the breathing could we know
The living from the dead. It seemed to us
That nature must have formed one body twice,
With life for one child only.
BRUNHILDA.
Had the Queen
A new-born baby in her arms?
FRIGGA.
Her life
She gave to bear her child, and with her died
The little maid.
BRUNHILDA.
Thou didst not tell me that.
FRIGGA. I never thought to tell thee. Sorrow broke
The mother's heart that she could never show
Her baby to her lord. For many years
This priceless joy in vain he had desired,
And, just a month before the child was born,
A sudden death o'ertook him.
BRUNHILDA.
Tell me more!
FRIGGA.
We sought the aged man, but he was gone.
The glowing mountain that had been cleft through
As one might split an apple, slowly now
Was drawn together there before our eyes.
BRUNHILDA.
The old man came no more?
FRIGGA.
Now hark to me!
Next morning to the grave we bore our Queen;
But when the priest was ready to baptize
The little maid, his arm fell helpless down,
Nor could he touch her forehead with the dew
Of holy water, and his good right arm
He never lifted more.
BRUNHILDA.
What, never more!
FRIGGA.
The man was old, and so we marveled not.
We called another priest. The holy dew
He sprinkled on the child. The blessed words
Of benediction halted on his tongue,
Nor hath his speech returned.
BRUNHILDA.
And now the third?
FRIGGA.
For him we waited long. We had to seek
In other lands afar, where of the tale
None knew. At last this priest baptized the child.
His holy office ended, down he fell
Upon the ground and nevermore arose!
BRUNHILDA.
And did the baby live
FRIGGA.
She throve apace,
And strong she grew. Her playful ways to us
Were signs what we should do or leave undone.
They ne'er deceived us, for the runes had said
That we might trust them ever.
BRUNHILDA.
Frigga! Frigga!
FRIGGA.
Thou art indeed the maid! Now dost thou know
Not in the gloomy caverns of the dead,
In Hecla where the ancient gods still dwell,
Among the Norns, among the Valkyries,
Seek thou the mother that gave birth to thee!
Oh, that no drop of holy water e'er
Had touched thy brow! Then were we wiser far.
BRUNHILDA.
What dost thou murmur?
FRIGGA.
How then did it hap
That on this morning we were not in bed,
But fully robed had tarried in the hall?
Our teeth were chattering and our lips were blue.
BRUNHILDA.
A sudden sleep o'erwhelmed us, that was all.
FRIGGA.
But had it ever happened?
BRUNHILDA.
Not before.
FRIGGA.
Then hark! The old man came and tried to speak.
It almost seems as if I'd seen him stand
And grasp thy shoulder; and he threatened me,
But heavy was thy sleep. Thou should'st not hear
What fate awaits thee if thou dost persist.
So offer sacrifice and then be free.
Oh, had I paid no heed unto the priest,
Howe'er he urged me! But the sacred runes
I had not read aright.--Come, sacrifice,
For danger cometh nigh.
BRUNHILDA.
'Tis nigh?
FRIGGA.
Alas!
Thou knowest that the fiery sea is quenched
That flamed around thy castle.
BRUNHILDA. Yet the knight
Still lingers who should wield the magic sword
And on his war-horse gallop through the flames,
When he had won proud Fafner's ill-starred hoard.
FRIGGA.
I may have erred. But yet this second sign
Cannot deceive me, for I long have known
That when the fateful hour shall come to thee,
Clear vision doth await thee. Sacrifice!
Mayhap the ancient gods surround thee now
Invisibly, and they will straight appear
With the first blood-drops of thine offering.
BRUNHILDA.
I do not fear.
[_Trumpets are heard._]
FRIGGA.
The trumpets!
BRUNHILDA.
Hast thou ne'er
Heard them before.
FRIGGA.
Never before with dread.
The time for lopping thistle-heads is past,
And iron helms arise before thee now.
BRUNHILDA.
Come hither all! For I will let her see
Brunhilda still can conquer! While the sea
Of fire still flamed I hastened forth to meet ye,
And friendly, as a trusty dog will spring
To give his master room, my faithful fire
Drew back before me, sank on either hand;
The road stands open now, but not my heart.
[_She ascends her throne._]
Now fling the portals wide and let them in!
Whoever here may come, his head is mine!
SCENE II
_The gates are opened. Enter SIEGFRIED, GUNTHER, HAGEN and VOLKER_
BRUNHILDA.
Who cometh seeking death?
(_To SIEGFRIED._)
Ah! Is it thou?
SIEGFRIED.
I am not seeking death, nor will I sue.
And too much honor dost thou yield to me
In greeting Gunther's guide before himself,
For I am but his helper.
BRUNHILDA (_turning to GUNTHER_).
Then 'tis thou?
And know'st thou what is toward?
GUNTHER.
Full well I know!
SIEGFRIED.
The rumor of thy beauty spreads abroad,
But further still the fame of thy hard heart.
And who hath gazed but once in thy deep eyes
Will nevermore forget, e'en in his cups,
That dreadful death beside thee always stands.
BRUNHILDA.
Tis true! Who cannot conquer, he must die,
And all his servants with him. Smilest thou?
Be not so proud! For if thou cam'st to me
As thou could'st hold a beaker full of wine
On high above thy head and still could'st gaze
On me as on a picture, yet I swear
That thou shalt fall as any other falls.
(_TO GUNTHER._)
But thee I counsel, if thine ears can hear,
List to my maidens! Bid them tell the tale
Of heroes that my hand hath laid full low!
The chance may hap among them there is one
Hath tried his strength with thee. There may be one
Hath laid thee conquered at his very feet!
HAGEN.
Ne'er was King Gunther conquered. That I vow!
SIEGFRIED.
High stands his castle by the Rhine at Worms,
And rich are all the treasures of his land;
Yet o'er all heroes stands he higher still,
And richer far in honors is our King.
HAGEN.
Thy hand, thou lowlander! Thou speakest well!
VOLKER.
And would it be so hard to leave this land
Amidst the ocean's desert solitude--
Of thy free will to leave it, and the King
To follow forth to life from night and hell?
This land is like no other on the earth.--
A desert waste, a rockbound wilderness;
All living things have fled long since in fear,
And if thou lovest it, 'tis only this,
That thou wast born the last of all thy race.
Above, the storms rage ever, and the sea
Forever surgeth and the fiery mount
In labor moaneth, while the fearful light
That streameth ruddy from the firmament,
As streams the blood from sacrificial stone,
Is such as devils only may endure.--
To breathe the air is like to drinking blood!
BRUNHILDA.
What knowest thou of this my wilderness?
Naught have I lacked from that fair world of thine.
And if I longed for aught, that would I take.
Remember that! Brunhilda needs no gifts!
SIEGFRIED.
Did I not tell ye true? To arms! To arms!
By force must she be brought from her wild home!
And once 'tis done, then will she give thee thanks.
BRUNHILDA.
Perchance that is not true. And knowest thou
The sacrifice thou askest? Thou know'st not,
And no man knoweth. Harken now to me,
And ask yourselves how I'll defend my rights.
With us the time is motionless; we know
Nor spring nor summer nor the autumntide.
The visage of the year is e'er the same,
And we within the land are changeless too.
But although nothing grows and blooms with us,
As in the sunlight of your distant home,
Still in our darkness ripen precious fruits
That in your land ye neither sow nor reap.
In the fierce joy of battle I delight
To conquer every haughty foe that comes
To steal my freedom. And I have my youth,
My glorious youth, and all the joy of life,
Which still suffice me, and, ere these I lose,
The benediction of the fates will fall
Invisibly upon me. I shall be
Their consecrated priestess evermore.
FRIGGA.
Is't possible? My offering sufficed?
BRUNHILDA.
The solid earth shall open 'neath my feet
Revealing all that's hidden in its depths;
And I shall hear the singing of the stars,
And their celestial music understand.
And still another joy shall be my share,
A third one, all impossible to grasp.
FRIGGA.
'Tis thou, 'tis Odin, hast unsealed her eyes!
In the deep night her ear was closed to thee--
Yet now she sees the spinning of the Norns.
BRUNHILDA (_rising to her full height, with fixed and dreaming
eyes_).
There comes a morning when I do not go
To hunt for bears, or find the great sea-snake
That's frozen in the ice, and set him free,
So that his struggles may not smite the stars.
I leave the castle early, bravely mount
My faithful steed. He bears me joyfully,
But suddenly I halt. Before my feet
The earth has turned to air, and shuddering
I wheel about. Behind me 'tis the same!
All is transparent--glowing clouds beneath,
As overhead. My maidens prattle still.
I call them--Are ye blind? Do ye see naught?
We float in empty space! They are amazed,
They shake their heads in silence, while they press
About me closer. Frigga whispers me:
And has thine hour come? Ah, now I see!
The solid earth is crystal to my gaze,
And what I deemed were clouds were but the web
Of gold and silver threads that, glistening,
Lay tangled in the depths.
FRIGGA.
Thy triumph comes!
BRUNHILDA.
An evening comes. All's changed, and lingering
We sit here late together. Suddenly,
As they were dead, the maidens fall; their words
Are frozen on their lips. I needs must go
Upon the tower, for above me rings
The sep'rate music of each farthest star.
At first 'tis only music to mine ear,
But with the dawn I murmur as in sleep:
The King will die ere nightfall and his son
Will never see the daylight, for he dies
Within his mother's womb! The others say
That so I told my tale, but I know naught
Of how I learned it. Soon I understand,
And swift the rumor flies from pole to pole
And distant people flock as now to me,
But not with swords to battle with me here--
Nay, humbly come they, laying by their crowns,
To hear my dreams and strive to understand
The meaning of my murmurings. For my eyes
Can see the future, in my hands I hold
The key to all the treasures of this world.
Far above all I rule, untouched by fate,
And yet the fates I know. But I forget.
That even more is promised me. There roll
Whole centuries away--millenniums--
I feel them not! Yet finally I ask:
Where then is death? My tresses answer me--
I see them in the mirror--they are black,
The snow has never touched them, and I say:
This is the third gift. Death comes not to me.
[_She sinks back, and the maidens support
her_.]
FRIGGA.
Why fear I still? For were it[1] Balmung's lord,
She hath a shield that will protect her now.
He'll fall, e'en if she loves but yet resists,
And she will struggle, since her fate she knows.
BRUNHILDA (_rising again_).
I spoke! What said I?
FRIGGA.
Take thy bow, my child.
Thy dart will fly today as ne'er before,
All else may wait!
BRUNHILDA (_to the knights_).
Come on!
SIEGFRIED (_to_ BRUNHILDA).
Thou swear'st
To follow us if thou art overcome?
BRUNHILDA (_laughs_).
I swear!
SIEGFRIED.
'Tis well! And I'll prepare the ship!
BRUNHILDA (_while going away addresses_ FRIGGA).
Go now into the trophy hall and drive
The nail that will be needed.
(_To the knights_.)
Follow me!
[_Exeunt omnes_.]
ACT II
_Worms. Courtyard of the Castle_.
SCENE I
_Enter_ RUMOLT _and_ GISELHER, _meeting_.
GISELHER.
Now, Rumolt, will a single tree be left?
For weeks now thou hast brought whole forests in
And grimly thou provid'st the wedding feast,
As if men, dwarfs, and elves were all to come.
RUMOLT.
I make me ready, and if I should find
A single kettle that's not full enough,
I'll seize the lazy cook and throw him in
And use the scullion-boy to stir the stew.
GISELHER.
Art thou so certain what the end will be?
RUMOLT.
I am, for Siegfried woos. The man who takes
Two noble princes captive, sends them home
As though they were no more than frightened hares,
Will not be daunted by a witch-wife now.
GISELHER.
There thou art right! We have good hostages
Since we have Lüdegast and Lüdeger!
They meant to bring a host of armèd men,
A greater than e'er Burgundy had seen.
Yet humbly here as prisoners they came,
Nor needed any guard upon their way.
So cook, my man, we shall not want for guests!
[GERENOT _enters_.]
And here's the hunter!
GERENOT.
But he brings no game!
I was upon the tower and saw the Rhine
All covered o'er with ships.
RUMOLT.
It is the bride!
I'll send my men to drive the beasts about,
That from the noisy turmoil in the court
The sound shall reach afar and prove to her
The welcome that awaits her!
[_Trumpets are heard_.]
GERENOT.
'Tis too late!
SCENE II
_Enter_ SIEGFRIED, _with retinue_.
SIEGFRIED.
Here am I once again!
GISELHER.
Without my brother?
SIEGFRIED.
Nay, fear not! As his messenger I come!--
And yet I bear the message not for thee!
'Tis for thy Lady Mother, and I hope
That I may see thy sister Kriemhild, too.
GISELHER.
Brave knight, that shalt thou, for we owe to thee
Our thanks for capturing the noble Danes.
SIEGFRIED.
I wish that I had never sent them here.
GISELHER.
Why so? Thou hadst no better way to prove
What we have gained in winning thy right arm,
For truly are the Princes stalwart men!
SIEGFRIED.
It may be! Yet had I not done the deed,
Perhaps some bird had flown and spread abroad
The rumor that the Danes had slain me there,
And I might ask how Kriemhild heard the tale.
GISELHER.
But as it is they help thy cause enough!
That one can take good metal and alloy
And beat them into trumpets smooth and round,
I long have known. But that one could shape men
In such a way I knew not, but these two
Show us the work of such a smith as thou.
They praised thee--If thou hadst been there to hear,
Thy cheeks would still flame scarlet! Yet 'twas not
With measured praise, as men will praise their foe,
Thinking to lessen thus the burning shame
Of their own downfall. No, 'twas heartfelt praise.
But you should hear Kriemhilda tell the tale.
Unweariedly she asked them o'er and o'er.--
She's coming now.
SCENE III
_Enter_ UTE _and_ KRIEMHILD.
SIEGFRIED.
I pray you!
GISELHER.
What's thy wish?
SIEGFRIED.
I never longed to have my father by,
That he might teach me how to bear my arms,
But ah! today I need my mother so,
That I might ask her how to use my tongue.
GISELHER.
Give me thy hand, since thou art shamefaced too.
They call me here "the child." Now let them see
A "child" may lead a lion!
[_He leads_ SIEGFRIED _to the women_.]
'Tis the knight
From Netherland!
SIEGFRIED.
Fair ladies, do not fear,
Because I've come alone.
UTE.
Brave Siegfried, no!
We do not fear, for thou art not the man
Who's left alone when all but he are dead,
To bear his tale, a messenger of woe.
Thou comest to announce a daughter dear,
And Kriemhild hath a sister.
SIEGFRIED.
So it is,
My Queen!
GISELHER.
So is it! Nothing more? And scarce
Those few words could he utter! Dost thou grudge
The king his bride? Or hast thou lamed thy tongue
In battle? That was never known before.
But no, for thou could'st use it fast enough
To tell me of Brunhilda's dark brown eyes
And raven tresses.
SIEGFRIED.
Prithee, say not so!
GISELHER.
How hotly he denies it! See him raise
On high three fingers, swearing that he loves
Blue eyes--light hair!
UTE.
This is an arrant rogue!
He is nor boy nor man, sapling nor tree.
And long hath he outgrown his mother's rod,
Nor ever hath he felt his father's whip.
Ungoverned is he as a yearling colt,
That's never known the bridle or the whip.
We must forgive or punish him!
SIEGFRIED.
'Twere not
So easy as you think! To break a colt
Is difficult, and many limp away
Ashamed, and cannot mount him!
UTE.
Then once more
He 'scapes his punishment!
GISELHER.
As a reward,
I'll tell a secret to thee.
KRIEMHILD.
Giselher!
GISELHER.
What hast thou to conceal? Be not afraid!
I do not know thy secret, nor will blow
The ashes from thy embers.--Never fear!
UTE.
What is it then?
GISELHER.
I have myself forgotten.
When a man's sister blushes rosy-red,
'Tis natural a brother is surprised
And seeks to know the reason.--Never mind!
The secret I'll recall before I die,
And then shall Siegfried learn it.
SIEGFRIED.
Thou may'st jeer,
For I forget my message utterly,
And ere I've given word that you should don
Your festal garments, do the trumpets blow,
And Gunther and his train bring in the bride!
GISELHER.
Dost thou not see the steward hastening?
Thy very coming told enough to him!
But I will help!
[_He goes to_ RUMOLT.]
KRIEMHILD.
A noble messenger
May not be paid with gifts!
SIEGFRIED.
Indeed he may!
KRIEMHILD (_fastens her bracelet and in so doing drops her
handkerchief)_.
SIEGFRIED (_snatches at the handkerchief)_.
This is my gift.
KRIEMHILD.
Pray, no! 'Twere all unworthy!
SIEGFRIED.
Jewels I value as another, dust.
And houses can I build of gold and silver,
Yet lack I such a kerchief!
KRIEMHILD.
Take it then!
It is my handiwork.
SIEGFRIED.
And thy free gift?
KRIEMHILD.
My noble Siegfried, yes, 'tis my free gift.
UTE.
I crave thy pardon--it is time to go!
[_Exit, with_ KRIEMHILD.]
SCENE IV
SIEGFRIED.
A Roland[2] would have stood as stood I here!
I wonder that the sparrows did not nest
Within my hair.
SCENE V
_Enter the_ CHAPLAIN.
CHAPLAIN (_advances_).
Your pardon, noble sir,
Has Brunhild been baptized?
SIEGFRIED.
She is baptized.
CHAPLAIN.
Then 'tis a Christian land from which she
comes?
SIEGFRIED.
They fear the cross.
CHAPLAIN (_steps back again_).
Perchance 'tis there as here!
Where men will place it next to Wotan's tree
Right gladly, for they do not surely know
If magic may not dwell there; as we see
Devoutest Christians hesitate to break
A heathen image, for some remnant still
Awakes within them of the olden fear
Before those staring eyes.
SCENE VI
_Flourish of trumpets_. BRUNHILDA, FRIGGA, GUNTHER, HAGEN, VOLKER,
_retainers_, KRIEMHILD _and_ UTE _approach them from the castle_.
GUNTHER.
And here's the castle!
My mother's coming now to welcome thee,
Kriemhilda too.
VOLKER (_to BRUNHILDA, _as the women approach each other_).
Are they no gain to thee?
HAGEN.
Siegfried, a word! Thy trick availed us naught.
SIEGFRIED.
Availed us naught? Was she not vanquished then?
Is she not here?
HAGEN.
What profit is in that?
SIEGFRIED.
Why, all!
HAGEN.
But nay! Who cannot take by force
Her first caress will master nevermore
This maid, and Gunther is not strong enough.
SIEGFRIED.
And has he tried?
HAGEN.
Why else should I complain?
In full sight of the castle! She at first
Resisted him, as it befits a maid,
And as our mothers may have done of old;
But when she saw that but the lightest touch
Sufficed to drive the ardent wooer forth,
She grew enraged, and, when he tarried still,
She seized and held him with her outstretched arm
Above the Rhine. A shame it was to him,
A shame to all of us.
SIEGFRIED.
She is a witch!
HAGEN.
Chide not, but help!
SIEGFRIED.
I think that if the priest
But married them--
HAGEN.
Were that old hag not there,
The woman that attends her! All day long
She spies and questions, and she sits by her
As the embodiment of wise old age.
I fear the nurse the most.
UTE (_to_ KRIEMHILD _and_ BRUNHILDA).
Now love each other,
And may the circlet that your arms have twined
In this first joyful moment widen out
Further and further to a perfect ring
Within which you may wander, side by side,
Sharing your joys in harmony complete!
Yours is a privilege that I had not,
For what I might not say unto my lord
I had to bear in silence; but at least
I could not speak complainingly of him.
KRIEMHILD.
Let us be like two sisters.
BRUNHILDA.
For your sake
Your son and brother may imprint the seal
Upon my lips that stamps me as his maid
Before the nightfall comes, for I am still
Unblemished and untouched like some young tree,
And were it not for your sweet gentleness
Forever would I hold this shame afar.
UTE.
Thou speak'st of shame?
BRUNHILDA.
Forgive me for that word;
I speak but as I feel. And I am strange
Here in your world, and as my rugged land
Would surely terrify you, were you there,
So does your land alarm me, for I feel
That here I could not have been born at all--Yet
must I live here!--Is the sky so blue
Forever?
KRIEMHILD.
Nearly all the time 'tis blue.
BRUNHILDA.
We know not blue, unless we see blue eyes,
And those we only have with ruddy hair
And milk-white faces! Is it always still,
And does the wind blow never?
KRIEMHILD.
Sometimes storms
O'erwhelm the land, and then the day is night
With thunderpeals and lightning.
BRUNHILDA.
Would it come
Today!--'Twould be a greeting from my home!
I cannot well endure the brilliant light;
It pains me and it makes me feel so bare,
As if no garment here were thick enough!
And are those flowers--red and gold and green?
KRIEMHILD. Thou ne'er hast seen them, yet thou know'st their hues?
BRUNHILDA. Of precious stones there is with us no lack--
Though never white or black ones; yet my hands
Have taught me white, and raven is my hair.
KRIEMHILD. Thou canst not know of fragrance!
[_She plucks a violet for her_.]
BRUNHILDA.
Oh how sweet!
And is't that tiny flower that breathes it forth--
The only one my eye did not observe?
I'd love to give the flower a pretty name--
But surely it is named.
KRIEMHILD.
The little flower
Is lowlier than all, and none thy foot
More easily had crushed, for it appears
To be ashamed that it is more than grass,
And so it hides its head; but yet it drew
A gentle word from thee, the first we've heard.
So let it be a token that within
Our land is much that's hidden from thy gaze
That will delight thee.
BRUNHILDA.
That I hope indeed--
For I need joy! Thou know'st not what it is
To be a woman, yet to overcome
A man in every combat and to gain
His strength that ebbs away as flows his blood,
And from the steaming blood breathe in new force--
To feel yourself grow stronger, braver yet,
And then, when victory is surer still--
[_Turning suddenly_]
Frigga, I ask again! What did I see--
Before that latest contest, what said I?
FRIGGA.
It seemed thy spirit must have seen this land.
BRUNHILDA.
This land!
FRIGGA.
Thou didst rejoice.
BRUNHILDA.
And I rejoiced!--
Thine eyes, however, flamed.
FRIGGA.
Because I saw
Thy happiness.
BRUNHILDA.
These warriors looked to me
As white as snow.
FRIGGA.
They had been ever so.
BRUNHILDA.
Wherefore didst thou conceal the dream so long?
FRIGGA.
It is but now that it is clear to me,
Now that I can compare.
BRUNHILDA.
If I rejoiced
When my prophetic vision saw this land,
I must rejoice again.
FRIGGA.
Thou surely shalt!
[Illustration: SIEGFRIED'S RETURN FROM THE SAXON WAR _From the
Painting by Schnorr von Carolsfeld_]
BRUNHILDA.
And yet it seems to me the vision dealt
With stars and metals too.
FRIGGA.
Yes, that is so.
Thou said'st the stars gleamed still more brightly here.
But yet that gold and silver were but dull.
BRUNHILDA.
Was't so?
FRIGGA (_to_ HAGEN).
Is't not the truth?
HAGEN.
I paid no heed.
BRUNHILDA.
I beg you all to treat me as a child;
Though I shall grow up faster than another.
Yet now I am no better.
(_To_ FRIGGA.)
That was all?
FRIGGA.
Yes, all!
BRUNHILDA.
Then all is well! Then all is well!
UTE (_to_ GUNTHER, _who has approached_).
My son, if she's too bitter toward thee now,
But give her time! The clamor of the crows
And ravens that she heard could never make
Her heart grow softer, but 'twill soften now
With the lark's song and with the nightingale.
HAGEN. So speaks the minstrel when he is in love,
And plays with foolish puppies. 'Tis enough!
The maiden must have time to find her heart,
But for the princess, hold her to her word;
By right of conquest she's already thine.--Then
claim thy rights!
(_He calls_.)
Chaplain!
(_And starts on_.)
GUNTHER.
I'll follow thee!
SIEGFRIED.
Wait, Gunther, wait! What didst thou promise me!
GUNTHER.
May I, my Kriemhild, choose a spouse for thee?
KRIEMHILD.
My lord and brother, be it as thou wilt!
GUNTHER (_to_ UTE).
I have no opposition then to fear?
UTE.
Thou art the king, thy handmaids, she and I.
GUNTHER.
I beg thee then amongst my kinsfolk here:
Redeem an oath for them and me, and give
Thy hand to noble Siegfried.
SIEGFRIED.
I've no power
To speak as I could wish to, when I gaze
Upon thy face, and of my stammering tongue
Perchance thou hast already heard enough.
And so I ask thee as the hunter asks,
But that I blow no feathers from my hat,
To hide my fear: O maiden, wilt thou me?
Yet lest thou err'st through my simplicity,
And unenlightened actest in the dark,
So let me tell thee, ere thou answer'st me,
How my own mother blames me oftentimes.
She says that I am surely strong enough
To conquer all the world, but yet to rule
The smallest molehill I'm too simple far.
And if I do not lose my very eyes
'Tis only that the thing's impossible.
Thou may'st believe the half of what she says,
The other half though, I can well disprove.
For if I once have won thee, I will show
The world how I can keep unharmed mine own.
Again I ask thee: Kriemhild, wilt thou me?
KRIEMHILD.
Why dost thou smile, my mother? I have not
Forgotten what I dreamed, the shudder still
Creeps over me and warns me more and more,
But still I say with dauntless courage: Yes!
BRUNHILDA (_steps between_ KRIEMHILD _and_ SIEGFRIED).
Kriemhild!
KRIEMHILD.
What wilt thou?
BRUNHILDA.
I will prove myself
Thy sister.
KRIEMHILD.
Now? Wherein?
BRUNHILDA (_to_ SIEGFRIED).
How dost thou dare
Aspire to her, the daughter of a king?
How dost thou dare, a vassal such as thou,
A serving man!
SIEGFRIED.
What?
BRUNHILDA.
Cam'st thou not as guide,
As messenger departed?
(_To_ GUNTHER.)
Canst thou suffer
And aid him in such boldness?
GUNTHER.
Siegfried is
The first of all our warriors.
BRUNHILDA.
Grant him then
The foremost seat beside thy very throne.
GUNTHER.
In treasure, he is richer far than I.
BRUNHILDA.
Is that his claim upon thy sister? Shame!
GUNTHER.
A thousand of my enemies he's slain.
BRUNHILDA.
The man who conquered me thanks him for that?
GUNTHER.
He is a king as I am.
BRUNHILDA.
Yet he ranks
Himself amongst thy servants?
GUNTHER.
I will solve
This riddle for thee when thou art mine own.
BRUNHILDA.
Ere I am thine thy secret will I know.
UTE.
Thou wilt refuse to call me mother then?
Oh tarry not too long, for I am old.
And worn with many sorrows!
BRUNHILDA.
As I swore,
I'll go with him to church, and I will be
Most willingly thy daughter--not his wife.
HAGEN (_to_ FRIGGA).
Pray quiet her!
FRIGGA.
What need is there of me?
For if he once has overcome Brunhild,
The second time he surely will not fail;
And self-defense is every maiden's right.
SIEGFRIED (_taking_ KRIEMHILD _by the hand_).
That all may know me henceforth as a king,
The Niblung's treasure do I give to thee.
And now thy duty and my right I claim.
[_He kisses her_.]
HAGEN.
To church!
FRIGGA.
Does Siegfried hold the Niblung's hoard?
HAGEN.
Thou heard'st! The trumpets!
FRIGGA.
And is Balmung[3] his?
HAGEN.
Why not? Musicians! Wedding music here!
[_Loud and joyful music. Exeunt omnes_.]
SCENE VII
_The great hall. Enter_ TRUCHS _and_ WULF. _Dwarfs bring treasures
across the stage._
TRUCHS.
I am for Kriemhild.
WULF.
And for Brunhild I.
TRUCHS.
And why, if thou wilt tell me?
WULF.
Where would be
The play of rival lances, if we all
Should wear one color?
TRUCHS.
Why, I grant thee that!
The reason is sufficient, otherwise
It were mere madness.
WULF.
Say it not so loud,
For many heroes swear by Brunhild now.
TRUCHS.
They are as different as day and night.
WULF.
Who says they're not? Yet many love the
night.
[_Points to the dwarfs_.]
What are they bringing?
TRUCHS.
It must be the hoard,
The treasure of the Niblungs Siegfried won.
He's called the dwarfs for escort duty here,
And bade them bring the treasure, and I'm told
It is the marriage portion for his bride.
WULF.
Uncanny are these dwarfs, with hollow backs!
But turn one over--there's a kneading trough!
TRUCHS.
And ever with the dragons is their home
Within the earth and in the mountain caves.--
First cousins to the moles they are.
WULF.
But strong!
TRUCHS.
And clever are they too! One need not seek
For mandrakes[4] if one has these dwarfs for
friends.
WULF (_pointing toward the treasure_).
He who owns that needs neither of the two.
TRUCHS.
I love it not. It is an ancient saw
That magic gold is thirstier for blood
Than ever was the driest sponge for water;
And, more than all, the Niblung heroes tell
The strangest tales!
WULF.
Of ravens was the talk.
What was it then? I heard it not aright.
TRUCHS.
A raven flew and lit upon the gold,
When it was carried to the ship, and there
He croaked till Siegfried, who could understand,
At first stopped up his ears and would not hear,
And whistled. Then the precious stones he threw
To drive the bird, and when it would not fly,
At last in desperation cast his spear.
WULF.
Why, that is strange! For Siegfried is at heart
As gentle as he's brave.
[_Horns are heard._]
They call for us!
They're gath'ring! Ho, Brunhilda!
TRUCHS.
Kriemhild, ho!
[_Exeunt. Other warriors, who meanwhile have assembled,
join them and repeat the cry. It grows dark gradually._]
SCENE VIII
_Enter HAGEN and SIEGFRIED._
SIEGFRIED.
But Hagen! Why didst thou make signs to me
To leave the banquet? I shall nevermore
Sit at this table as I sit today.
Pray grant me this one day, I only ask
A just reward.
HAGEN.
Your task is not yet done.
SIEGFRIED.
Let be till morning, for a minute's worth
A year today. I still can count the words
That I have spoken to my loving bride;
Then let me have one evening with my wife.
HAGEN.
Without good reason I will ne'er disturb
A lover or a drunkard. It avails
No longer to resist! What Brunhild said
Thou'st heard, and now her wedding gayety
Thou may'st behold, for at the feast she weeps!
SIEGFRIED.
And can I dry her tears?
HAGEN.
She'll keep her word,
The threat that she has sworn, there is no doubt;
That endless shame would follow may we doubt
Still less. Dost thou not understand me now?
SIEGFRIED.
What follows them
HAGEN.
That thou must conquer her.
[_GUNTHER approaches._]
SIEGFRIED.
What, I?
HAGEN.
Now listen! Gunther goes with her
Into the chamber.[5] In the Tarnhelm thou
Must follow. Quickly he demands a kiss
Ere she has raised her veil.--She grants it not.
He grapples with her.--She laughs mockingly.
He quenches, as by accident, the light--
Exclaims: So much is jest, 'tis earnest now.
It will not be on shore as on the ship!
Then shalt thou seize her and so master her
That she shall beg for mercy and for life.
And when thy part is done, then shall the king
Demand her oath to be his humblest maid,
And thou shalt vanish as thou cam'st.
GUNTHER.
Wilt thou
But do me this one service now, my friend,
I vow I'll never ask thee then for more.
HAGEN.
He must and will. The task he has begun,
How should he then not finish?
SIEGFRIED.
If I would!
For truly you demand a deed from me
That I might well refuse another time
Than on my wedding day to do for you--
How could I pray? What should I tell Kriemhild?
She has so much already to forgive,
The very ground is hot beneath my feet.
Should I repeat the misdeed once again
She never could forgive me in her life.
HAGEN.
When a young daughter from her mother parts
And leaves the room where once the cradle stood,
Into the bridal chamber she must pass,
The farewell is a long one, know my friend.
There's time enough for thee, and so--agreed!
(_As SIEGFRIED refuses his hand._)
Brunhilda now is like a wounded deer,
Who'd let it with the arrow run away?
A noble hunter sends the second shaft.
The lost is ever lost, nor may return.
The haughty heiress of the Valkyries
And Norns is dying. Give the final stroke!
A happy woman laughs tomorrow morn
And only says: I had a troubled dream!
SIEGFRIED.
I know not, something warns me.
HAGEN.
Will Frau Ute
Be ready ere thou art? Nay, there's no fear,
For three times yet will she call Kriemhild back
To bless her and embrace her.
SIEGFRIED.
I refuse.
HAGEN.
What? If this moment came a messenger
In haste announcing that thy father lay
Sick unto death, would'st thou not call at once
For thy good steed? And surely would thy bride
Speed thy departure! Yet a father may,
Though old, recover. Honor wounded once
By cruel wrong, nor mended speedily,
Will never from the dead be raised again.
The honor of the king's the guiding star
Which brings or light or darkness to the knights,
As to the king himself. O woe to him
Who hesitates and robs him of one ray.
Had I thy strength I'd sue to thee no more,
But do the deed myself with pride and joy.
And yet by magic was Brunhilda won,
And magic arts must finish now the task.
Then do it! Must I kneel?
SIEGFRIED.
I like it not!
Who would have dreamed of this! And yet it lay
So very near! O nature three times blest!
In all my life no deed I've shunned like this;
Yet what thou say'st is true. So let it be.
GUNTHER.
I'll go and give my mother but a hint--
HAGEN.
No, no! No woman! We're already three
And have, I hope, no tongue to tell the tale.
Let death the fourth one in our compact be!
[_Exeunt omnes._]
ACT III
_Morning. Courtyard of the castle. The cathedral is at one side._
SCENE I
_Enter_ RUMOLT _and_ DANKWART _armed._
RUMOLT.
Three dead!
DANKWART.
For yesterday it was enough,
For that was but the prelude! Now there'll be
Another tale to tell.
RUMOLT.
These Nibelungs
Are e'er prepared for death; they bring their shrouds
And each man wears both shroud and sword at once.
DANKWART.
The customs are so strange in northern lands!
For as the mountains grow more rugged still
And cheerful oaks make way for sombre firs,
Just so does man grow gloomy, till at last
He's wholly lost and but the brute remains!
First comes a race that cannot even sing,
And next another race that cannot laugh,
Then follows one that's dumb, and so it goes.
SCENE II
_Music. A great procession._ WULF _and_ TRUCHS _among the warriors._
RUMOLT (_joining_ DANKWART).
Will Hagen be content?
DANKWART.
I think he will.
This is a summons, as it were, to war!
Yet he is right, for this strange princess needs
Quite other morning serenades than sings
The lark that warbles in the linden tree.
[_They pass by._]
SCENE III
_Enter_ SIEGFRIED _with_ KRIEMHILD.
KRIEMHILD (_calling attention to her attire_).
Wilt thou not thank me?
SIEGFRIED.
Nay, what dost thou mean?
KRIEMHILD.
But look at me!
SIEGFRIED. That thou art living, smiling,
I give thee thanks, and that thine eyes are blue--
I love not black--
KRIEMHILD.
Thou dost but praise the Lord
In his handmaiden! Did I make myself,
Thou simple fellow? Did I choose the eyes
Thou dost admire?
SIEGFRIED.
Yet love, methinks, might dream
E'en such strange fancies! One fair morn in May
When all things glistened as they glisten now,
Two crystal dewdrops, clearer than the rest,
Were hanging on the harebells bluest spray;
And thou hast stolen them, and evermore
All heaven's in thine eyes.
KRIEMHILD.
Then rather give
Thy thanks to me that as a child I fell
So wisely. My blue eyes I might have lost
The day I only marked my temple here!
SIEGFRIED.
Oh, let me kiss the scar!
KRIEMHILD.
Thy healing art
Would be but lost. No balsam craves the wound
That's long since healed. But tell me more!
SIEGFRIED.
I thank
Thy mouth--
KRIEMHILD.
With words?
SIEGFRIED (_about to embrace her_).
But may I thank thee so?
KRIEMHILD (_draws back_).
Dost think that I invite thee?
SIEGFRIED.
With words then
For thy words! No, for sweeter yet than words,
Thy murmuring of tender secret things
My ear finds precious, as my lips thy kiss.
I thank thee for thy secret gazing forth
To see us throwing weights to win the prize.
Oh, had I dreamed of it! And for thy scorn
And mockery--
KRIEMHILD.
A maiden's pride to soothe
For tarrying, thou thinkest? Cruel friend!
I told thee in the dark! But wilt thou see
My blushes now when in the light of day
Thou tellest me the tale? My foolish blood
Flushes and pales so fast, my mother says
That I am like a rose-bush that sends forth
Red buds and white upon a single stem--
Else hadst thou never found my secret out.
For I could feel the burning of my cheeks,
When yestermorn my brother teased me so.
I saw no way but to confess to thee.
SIEGFRIED.
Then may he start the noblest stag today!
KRIEMHILD.
And may he miss him! Yes, I wish it too.--
see thou art just like my uncle, Hagen,
Who, if one lays a garment by his bed,
That one has made in secret, will not heed
Unless perchance it is too tight.
SIEGFRIED.
And why?
KRIEMHILD.
Thou only see'st God's and nature's gifts
In all that's mine, but my own handiwork,
The raiment that adorns me, thou see'st not--
Not even the fair girdle that I wear.
SIEGFRIED.
The girdle's gay, and yet I'd rather wind
About thy waist the rainbow's lovely hue;
Methinks that ye would suit each other well.
KRIEMHILD.
But bring it me at night and I will change,
Yet do not throw it down like this I wear.
'Tis but by chance I did not lose thy gift.
SIEGFRIED.
What sayest thou?
KRIEMHILD.
But for the precious stones,
It might be underneath the table still,
But fire is a thing one cannot hide.
SIEGFRIED.
Is that my gift?
KRIEMHILD.
It is.
SIEGFRIED.
But thou art dreaming!
KRIEMHILD.
I found it in the room.
SIEGFRIED.
It is thy mother's!
She must have let it fall.
KRIEMHILD.
It is not hers!
For well I know her ornaments. I thought
It had been taken from the Niblung's hoard;
To give thee joy I put it on at once.
SIEGFRIED.
I thank thee, but the girdle I know not!
KRIEMHILD (_takes the girdle off_).
Then for my golden girdle make thou room
Which thou concealest! I was all attired,
And only put it on to honor thee,
My mother also, for this golden one
She gave to me.
SIEGFRIED.
But that is very strange!--
'Twas lying on the floor?
KRIEMHILD.
It was.
SIEGFRIED.
And crumpled?
KRIEMHILD.
I see you know it well! The second trick
Succeeded like the first, and now I have
My task twice over!
[_She starts to put the girdle on again._]
SIEGFRIED.
No! For God's sake, no!
KRIEMHILD.
Art thou in earnest?
SIEGFRIED (_to himself_).
'Twas with that she strove
To tie my hands.
KRIEMHILD.
Art laughing?
SIEGFRIED (_to himself_).
Then I raged,
And put forth all my strength.
KRIEMHILD.
Nay, thou art not?
SIEGFRIED (_to himself_).
I snatched at something.
KRIEMHILD.
That I'll soon believe.
SIEGFRIED (_to himself_).
I thrust it, when she grasped for it again,
Into my bosom, and--Now give it me!
No well is deep enough to hide it in;
With a great stone I'll sink it in the Rhine!
KRIEMHILD.
Siegfried!
SIEGFRIED.
I must have lost it--Give it me!
KRIEMHILD.
Where didst thou get this girdle?
SIEGFRIED.
Nay, this is
A dark and fearful secret; thou should'st seek
To learn no whit about it.
KRIEMHILD.
Yet thou hast
Confided one still greater, and I know
The place where Death may strike the fatal blow.
SIEGFRIED.
That I alone protect!
KRIEMHILD.
And there are two
To guard the other!
SIEGFRIED (_to himself_).
I was far too quick.
KRIEMHILD (_covers her face_).
Thou gav'st thy oath to me! Why didst thou that?
I had not even asked it.
SIEGFRIED.
Still I swear,
I ne'er have known a woman!
KRIEMHILD (_holds up the girdle_).
SIEGFRIED.
That was used
To bind me.
KRIEMHILD.
If a lion told the tale
'Twere less incredible!
SIEGFRIED.
And yet 'tis true.
KRIEMHILD.
This hurts me most! To such a man as thou,
The sin itself, however black it be,
Is more becoming than the cloak of lies
Wherewith he fain would hide it.
_Enter_ GUNTHER _and_ BRUNHILDA.
SIEGFRIED.
We must go!
They come!
KRIEMHILD.
But who! Does Brunhild know the girdle?
SIEGFRIED.
Pray hide it quickly!
KRIEMHILD.
No, I'll show it them!
SIEGFRIED.
I pray thee hide it. Then thou shalt know all.
KRIEMHILD (_hiding the girdle_).
So Brunhilda knows the girdle?
SIEGFRIED.
Listen then!
[_Both follow the procession._]
SCENE IV
BRUNHILDA.
Was that not Kriemhild?
GUNTHER.
Yes.
BRUNHILDA.
How long does she
Tarry beside the Rhine?
GUNTHER.
She'll soon depart,
For Siegfried must go home.
BRUNHILDA.
I'll grant him leave,
And willingly dispense with his farewell.
GUNTHER.
But dost thou hate him so?
BRUNHILDA.
I cannot bear
To see thy noble sister sink so low.
GUNTHER.
She does as thou dost.
BRUNHILDA.
Nay, thou art a man!
This name which was of old to me the call
To arms, now fills my heart with joy and pride!
Yes, Gunther, I am wonderfully changed.
Thou see'st it too? There's something I might ask,
But yet I do not!
GUNTHER.
Thou'rt my noble wife!
BRUNHILDA.
'Tis sweet to hear that word, and now it seems
As strange to me that once I used to ride
To battle on my horse and hurl my spear,
As it would seem to see thee turn the spit!
I cannot bear the sight of weapons now,
And my own shield I find too heavy far;
I tried to lay it by, but had to call
My maid. I'd rather watch the spiders spin
And see the little birds that build their nests,
Than go with thee!
GUNTHER.
Yet this time thou must go!
BRUNHILDA.
And I know why. Forgive me! What I thought
Was weakness was but magnanimity,
For thou would'st not disgrace me on the ship
When I defied thee! Naught of that there dwelt
Within my heart, and therefore has the strength
That some caprice of nature gave to me
Departed from me, and returned to thee!
GUNTHER.
Since thou art gentle, then be reconciled
With Siegfried too!
BRUNHILDA.
Oh, name him not to me!
GUNTHER.
There is no reason thou shouldst hate him so.
BRUNHILDA.
And if I have none? When a king descends
To fill the humble office of a guide
And carry messages, it is indeed
As strange as if a man should take the place
Of his own horse, the saddle on his back,
Or bay and hunt in service of his hound.
But if it pleases him, what's that to me!
GUNTHER.
It was not so.
BRUNHILDA.
Still stranger 't is to see
His noble stature tow'ring high above
All other men, so that it even seems
That he has gathered all the royal crowns
Of all the world to forge them into one,
And thus to show the world for the first time
A perfect picture of true majesty.
For it is true, while still upon the earth
More crowns than one are gleaming, none is round,
And for the sun's full circle even thou
Wearest a crescent pale upon thy head.
GUNTHER.
But see. Thou hast already viewed the man
With other eyes.
BRUNHILDA.
I greeted him ere thee.
Then slay him--challenge him--win my revenge!
GUNTHER.
Brunhilda! He's the husband of my sister,
And so his blood is mine.
BRUNHILDA.
Do battle then
With him and lay him low upon the ground,
And let me see thy rightful majesty
When he is as a footstool for thy feet!
GUNTHER.
Our custom is not so.
BRUNHILDA. I will not yield;
His downfall I must see. Thou hast the heart
Of life, and he the glitter and the show.
But blow away this magic which e'er holds
The gaze of fools upon him. If Kriemhild
Casts down those eyes in shame, that now she lifts
Almost too proudly when she's by his side,
'Twill do no damage, and I promise thee
Far richer love if thou wilt do the deed.
GUNTHER.
He too is strong.
BRUNHILDA.
That he the dragon slew
And conquered Alberich, does not compare
With thy great prowess. For in thee and me
Have man and woman for eternity
Fought the last battle for supremacy.
Thou art the victor, and I ask no more
Than still to see those honors deck thy brow
Of which I was so jealous. For thou art
The strongest man of all; so cast him down
From golden clouds to earth for my delight,
And leave him naked, destitute, and bare--
Then let him live a hundred years or more.
[_Exeunt._]
SCENE V
_Enter_ FRIGGA _and_ UTE.
UTE.
Brunhilda looks already happier
Than yesterday.
FRIGGA.
My Queen, she truly is.
UTE.
I thought it would be so.
FRIGGA.
But I did not!
Her mind is strangely altered, 'twould astound
Me not a whit now if her nature too
Should alter and her hair should change to blonde
Instead of raven tresses that of old
So richly waved beneath my golden comb.
UTE.
Thou dost not grieve, I trust?
FRIGGA.
I'm more amazed.
If this heroic woman thou hadst reared
As I have done, and knew all that I know,
Then would thy wonder be no less than mine.
UTE (_turning to go back into the castle_).
Do what thou canst!
FRIGGA.
I surely have done more
Than ever thou couldst dream of. How this came
I cannot tell, but if she's happy now
I am content, and of the olden time
She hath forgotten never will I tell.
SCENE VI
_Enter_ KRIEMHILD _and_ BRUNHILDA, _hand in hand. A large number of
warriors and people gather._
KRIEMHILD.
Wouldst thou not watch the combat from afar
Rather than join the fray?
BRUNHILDA.
Hast thou tried both,
That thus thou canst compare them?
KRIEMHILD.
I'd not bear
The heat of battle.
BRUNHILDA.
Then thou shouldst not try
To judge of it!--No insult I intend.
Nay, do not draw thy hand away from mine!
It may be so, and yet I thought this joy
Were but for me alone.
KRIEMHILD.
What dost thou mean?
BRUNHILDA. Surely no woman can rejoice to see
Her husband conquered.
KRIEMHILD.
Never!
BRUNHILDA. Nor deceive
Herself if in the fray he's not unhorsed,
Because his conqueror spares him.
KRIEMHILD. Surely not.
BRUNHILDA. What then!
KRIEMHILD. But I am quite secure from that?
Thou smilest?
BRUNHILDA. Over-confident art thou.
KRIEMHILD. It is my right!
BRUNHILDA. It may not come to proof,
And even a dream is sweet--so slumber on,
And I will never wake thee.
KRIEMHILD. What say'st thou?
My noble husband is too gentle far
To grieve the rulers of his royal realm,
Else had he made a sceptre long ago
Of his good sword and held it forth so far
That its great shadow covered all the earth.
For all the lands are subject unto him,
And should but one deny it, I would ask
That land from him to make a flower bed.
BRUNHILDA.
Kriemhild, what then would be my husband's place?
KRIEMHILD.
He is my brother, and the standard's his
Whereby one weighs all others. None weighs him.
BRUNHILDA.
No, for he is the standard of the world!
And as 'tis gold decides the worth of things,
So he the worth of heroes and of knights.
Thou must not contradict me, dearest child,
And in return I'll listen patiently
If thou wilt only teach me how to sew.
KRIEMHILD.
Brunhilda!
BRUNHILDA.
Nay, I did not speak in scorn;
I long to sew, and needle-work is not
My birthright like the throwing of the lance,
For which I never sought a master's aid,
More than I needed aid to stand or walk.
KRIEMHILD.
If 'tis thy wish, we can begin at once;
And since thou best enjoyest making wounds
We'll take the bodkin for embroidery.
I have a pattern!--
[_She is about to show the girdle._]
No, I have it not.
BRUNHILDA.
Thou lookest on thy sister coldly now.
But 'tis not friendly to withdraw thy hand
From my fond clasp before I give it up--
At least our custom is the contrary.
And canst thou not be reconciled to know
The sceptre of thy dreams is given now
Into thy brother's hands? Thou art his sister,
And that should comfort thee. A brother's fame
Is half thine own, so thou shouldst yield to me,
Before all other women, honor's crown
That once for all could never have been thine,
For no one could have paid for it as I.
KRIEMHILD.
'Tis thus perverted nature takes revenge.
Thou didst resist love's rule as no one else,
And now this blindness is thy penalty.
BRUNHILDA.
Thou speakest of thyself and not of me!
We need not quarrel, for the whole world knows
That ere my mother bore me, 'twas my fate
The strongest knight alone should conquer me.
KRIEMHILD.
I can believe it.
BRUNHILDA.
Well?
KRIEMHILD (_laughs_).
BRUNHILDA.
Then thou art mad!
Perchance thou fear'st that we shall be too harsh
With all the vassals? Yet thou need'st not fear!
I plant no flower beds in conquered lands,
And only once will I claim precedence
If thou art not too proud and obstinate,--
Here at the church today and nevermore.
KRIEMHILD.
Indeed I'd never have denied it thee,
But, since my husband's honor is at stake,
I will not yield one step.
BRUNHILDA.
He will command
That thou shalt yield.
KRIEMHILD.
How dare'st thou scorn him so!
BRUNHILDA.
He made way for thy brother in my hall,
As vassals for their lord, and he refused
My proffered greeting!--That did not seem strange
While I still thought him--as he called himself--
A serving-man, a messenger to me.
But now it all seems changed.
KRIEMHILD.
And how is that?
BRUNHILDA.
I've seen a wolf slip silently away
Before a bear, and then I've seen the bear
Flee from the mountain bull. Though he's not sworn,
Yet is he still a vassal.
KRIEMHILD.
Say no more!
BRUNHILDA.
Wilt threaten me? Do not forget thyself!
I have my senses--see that thou keep thine:
There must have been some cause beneath all this.
KRIEMHILD.
There was! And if thou shouldst suspect the cause,
How thou wouldst shudder.
BRUNHILDA.
Shudder!
KRIEMHILD.
Yes, indeed!
But do not fear! I love thee even now
Too fondly. Never can I hate thee so
That I will tell the cause. Had aught like that
Befallen me, today I'd dig my grave
With my own hands. Brunhilda, never fear!
I will not make thee the most wretched soul
That draws the breath of life upon the earth!
Then keep thy pride, for pity makes me dumb.
BRUNHILDA.
Thou boastest, Kriemhild! I despise thee now!
KRIEMHILD.
My husband's concubine despises me!
BRUNHILDA.
Put her in chains! She rages! Bind her then!
KRIEMHILD (_draws out the girdle_).
Know'st thou this girdle?
BRUNHILDA.
Well I do. 'Tis mine.
And since I see it in a stranger's hands
It must be that 'twas stolen in the night.
KRIEMHILD.
'Twas stolen! 'Twas no thief that gave it me!
BRUNHILDA.
Who then?
KRIEMHILD.
The man who overpowered thee!
But not my brother!
BRUNHILDA.
Kriemhild!
KRIEMHILD.
Thy fierce strength
Had surely strangled Gunther, then perchance
Thou would'st have loved the dead as punishment.
My husband gave it me!
BRUNHILDA.
'Tis false!
KRIEMHILD.
'Tis true!
Now scorn him if thou canst! Wilt now consent
That I may pass before thee through the door?
(_To her women._)
Now follow. She shall see me prove my rights!
[_They leave and enter the cathedral._]
[Illustration: "SCHNORR VON CAROLSFELD THE QUARREL OF THE QUEENS"]
SCENE VII
BRUNHILDA.
Where are the lords of Burgundy!--Oh Frigga!
Didst thou hear that?
FRIGGA.
I heard, and I believe it.
BRUNHILDA.
Oh this is death! 'Tis true?
FRIGGA.
She said too much,
Surely too much--but this is plain to me,
That thou hast been betrayed!
BRUNHILDA.
'Tis not a lie?
FRIGGA.
'Twas Balmung's master. On the shore he stood
When died the flames.
BRUNHILDA.
Then he rejected me.
For I was on the rampart and I know
He saw me. But his heart was full of her.
FRIGGA.
That thou mayst know what thou hast lost by fraud,
I too deceived thee!
BRUNHILDA (_without listening to her_).
Hence the haughty calm
With which he gazed upon me!
FRIGGA.
Not alone
This narrow country, but the whole wide earth
Was meant to be thy kingdom, and to thee
The stars should tell their message. Even death
Should lose his fell dominion over thee!
BRUNHILDA.
Speak not of that!
FRIGGA.
Why not? Thy glories lost
Thou'lt not regain, but yet thou canst avenge
Thy wrongs, my child!
BRUNHILDA.
And I will have revenge!
Despised and scorned! Oh, woman, in his arms
If thou hast mocked at me a single night,
Thou shalt weep bitterly for many years!
I will--Alas! I am as weak as she.
[_Throws herself on FRIGGA's bosom._]
SCENE VIII
_Enter_ GUNTHER, HAGEN, DANKWART, RUMOLT, GERENOT, GISELHER _and_
SIEGFRIED.
HAGEN.
What then is wrong?
BRUNHILDA (_drawing herself up to her full height, to
GUNTHER_).
Am I concubine?
GUNTHER.
A concubine?
BRUNHILDA.
Thy sister calls me so!
HAGEN (_to FRIGGA_).
What happened here?
FRIGGA.
Ye are discovered now!
We know the conqueror, and Kriemhild vows
That he was twice a victor.
HAGEN
(_to GUNTHER_).
He has told!
[_He speaks to him aside._]
SCENE IX
KRIEMHILD (_who has meanwhile come out of the cathedral_).
Forgive me, Siegfried, for the wrong I did!
Yet if thou knewest how she slandered thee--
GUNTHER (to SIEGFRIED).
Hast thou then boasted?
SIEGFRIED (_laying his hand on KRIEMHILD's head_).
By her life I swear,
I never did.
HAGEN.
No oath is needed here!
He only told the truth.
SIEGFRIED.
And even that
Upon compulsion!
HAGEN. That I do not doubt!
The tale can wait the telling. 'Tis our part
To separate the women, for we know
That serpents' crests may ever rise again
If they too soon gaze in each other's eyes.
SIEGFRIED.
I'm soon departing hence. Come, Kriemhild, come!
KRIEMHILD (_to BRUNHILDA_).
If thou couldst know how thou didst anger me,
Then even thou--
BRUNHILDA (_turns away_).
KRIEMHILD.
Since thou dost love my brother,
How canst thou hate the means that gave thee him
To be his bride?
BRUNHILDA.
Oh, Oh!
HAGEN.
Away! Away!
SIEGFRIED (_leading KRIEMHILD away_).
There's been no tattling here, as you shall see.
[_Exeunt._]
SCENE X
HAGEN.
Come, gather round and vote without delay
The doom of death.
GUNTHER.
Hagen, what sayest thou?
HAGEN.
Have we not cause enough? There stands the Queen
And burning tears are streaming from her eyes.
For shame she weeps!
(_To BRUNHILDA._)
Oh, thou heroic Queen,
To whom alone my homage I do yield,
The man who shamed thee so must surely die!
GUNTHER. Hagen!
HAGEN (_to BRUNHILDA_).
The man must die unless thou wilt
Forego revenge and plead for him thyself.
BRUNHILDA.
I'll touch no food till judgment is fulfilled.
HAGEN.
Forgive me that I spoke before my king!
I only strove to make the matter plain,
Yet free decision is thy royal right--
So make thy choice between thy bride and him.
GISELHER.
Thou canst not mean it! For a trifling fault,
Thou wouldst not slay the truest man on earth?
My King! My brother! Say it is not so!
HAGEN.
Will ye rear bastards here within your court?
I doubt me if the proud Burgundians
Will crown them! Yet thou art the master here!
GERENOT.
Brave Siegfried soon will quell all murmurings,
If we ourselves cannot perform the task.
HAGEN (_to_ GUNTHER).
Thou speakest not. 'Tis well. The rest is mine!
GISELHER.
In bloody counsels I will take no part!
[_Exit_.]
SCENE XI
BRUNHILDA.
Frigga, I tell thee he or I must die!
FRIGGA.
'Tis he must die!
BRUNHILDA.
I was not merely scorned,
But passed from hand to hand. They bartered
me!
FRIGGA.
They bartered thee!
BRUNHILDA.
Too mean to be his wife,
I was the price for which he bought him one.
FRIGGA.
The price, my child!
BRUNHILDA.
O this is worse than murder!
And I will have revenge, revenge, revenge!
[_Exeunt omnes_.]
ACT IV
_Worms._
SCENE I
_Great hall._ GUNTHER _with his warriors._ HAGEN _carries a spear._
HAGEN.
A blind man e'en can hit a linden leaf;
At fifty paces I will wager you
With this good spear to split a hazelnut.
GISELHER.
Why dost thou choose this day to show thy skill?
We've always known thy arms would never rust.
HAGEN.
He comes! Now show me you can wear dark looks
And altered bearing although none has lost
His father.