Minna/Book 2, Chapter 6
We walked slowly back. At the corner of the shed was a big, blue letter-box. Minna smiled, pulled a letter out of her pocket, and held it in front of me so that I might read the address, which was, as I had guessed, Stephensen's. Then, having looked at me with a questioning glance, which said, "Shall I?" she stretched out her hand and put it under the flap. The letter fell with a dull sound into the empty box. Though this sound gave me the answer I longed for, it, at the same time, raised in me a faint feeling of uneasiness, as of a bad omen. This passing and apparently quite uncalled-for feeling I remember most distinctly, though not for a moment did I yield to it. For I had already drawn her to me, and soon felt my embrace returned with a fervour which had not so much the character of passion as of deep tenderness. Her strong maiden-arms in thus clinging to me seemed to seek to bind us so closely together that nothing could part us. When she noticed that I gasped for breath, she suddenly let me go.
"Have I hurt you? I am so violent."
She looked so terrified, as if I really might have broken to pieces in her arms, that involuntarily I burst out laughing, and covered her face with kisses, until she hushed me with a still startled, yet roguish, look peeping out of wide-open eyes, and whispered from half-parted lips on which she laid her finger. But nobody was near, and the corner of the shed hid us in a three-cornered shadow.
We left it at last. I wanted to take her farther out along the river, but she did not like the darkness, and wanted to go towards the town. "We can be reasonable," she said. But our words were not so much talk as translated caresses.
We walked slowly arm-in-arm on the broad quay towards the lights of the town, which, like scattered sparks, mounted towards the stars, and some distance ahead of us, against the bend of the river, culminated in a golden border inlaid with the green enamel of the hotel gardens. On the opposite bank nothing was to be seen but two coloured signal lamps, and the dark mass of rock only showed as a starless part of the sky.
The express tore past on the other side of the river, and reminded us of the time. But just now the light in front of us began to brighten with a mother-of-pearl-like shade, and under the clearing the dark bend of a mountain appeared. The masts of a couple of Elbe rafts showed against the sky. The glare quickly became redder, as if from a fire; had one been near the Rhine, one would have imagined it to be Brünhilde's rock ablaze, mounting like a glowing dome over Winterberg's even wood-stretches, just where the depression midway silhouetted itself. A few minutes afterwards the moon floated free, growing ever less golden and more crystalline over the mountain landscape with its river band, a scene which it seemed to create out of the chaos of the night and gradually bring to perfection.
It was too beautiful for us to think of parting. We kept on going backwards and forwards along the river, from the little lonely waiting-shed until we came so close to the garden of the first hotel that we could see the black coats and the many-coloured hats of the ladies moving under the foliage.
Alone in this strange spot we seemed to be a newly-married couple on their honeymoon, and I blessed the happy incident which had forced us to stay overnight.
"I was in reality also pleased at first," said Minna, "but soon afterwards I felt anxious, for in a way I had it on my conscience. I ought not to have been so positive. I myself had only a few marks in my pocket. If you had not had any more, my recklessness would have brought us into a nice dilemma. I did feel relieved when I saw you talking to Hertz and understood that you did not need to borrow anything from him. I was already quite alarmed.… Oh, the money, Harald! Perhaps it was a reminder how one always has to think of it when planning out anything."
We soon lost ourselves in plans for the future and calculations as to how little, with the help of economy, would be enough; apparently a very prosaic subject, but one that for a young couple (just as poor as loving) in reality possesses a greater attraction than even the most elevated romance. Notwithstanding our enthusiasm, I doubt whether the gold that the moon shed over the darkness of the river appeared to us more poetical than that with which our household needs were to be paid in due time. And I must admit that the one was just as unreal and fantastic as the other.