Minna/Book 4, Chapter 2
Mrs. Jagemann opened the door to us in rather an alarmed manner. She drew Minna aside in the dark passage and whispered something to her, and as I closed the door of the sitting-room I heard Minna say—
"Yes, yes, we have met him ourselves."
"Oh dear me!" the mother sighed in her stupid way.
This did not improve my temper. I continued to walk up and down, and without knowing it myself I shook my fist at Stephensen's alter ego on the sea picture. I caught myself in this act as the door opened, and I quickly dropped the hand and put it in my pocket.
Minna threw herself wearily upon the little sofa.
"What does he want from me?" she exclaimed in a worried tone.
"You? But he has come in order to paint."
She shook her head.
"He wishes to take possession of me again, that's what he wants."
"What a funny fancy! How can you believe that?"
"You have thought the same yourself," she said, and looked at me inquiringly.
"Perhaps for a moment. Queer ideas come to one under such extraordinary circumstances. However, there is no reason to"
"Did you notice the way he said to me, 'Wherever you go when you leave for your new home'?—those words were quite clear; I know his way only too well."
"But, indeed, it would be too bold. Just as we are engaged! No, had we even been married a couple of years, then I should think it more likely that a fellow with his easy-going ideas might think there was hope."
"For shame, it is nasty to speak like that, you have no right to talk of him in that way."
"You defend him!"
"Is that so strange? You know quite well yourself that it is unjust of you, besides, you ought to remember that it grieves me when you express such a low opinion of him; for, after all, I have cared for him, and, of course, still do.… And you have not been at all nice this afternoon; all the time you went on aiming remarks at him, and I was so nervous; you did not make it easier for me, and it was quite difficult enough without that."
"You are right, Minna! Forgive me. I felt it myself; but you must be able to understand—in such a frame of mind and under such conditions."
"It proves that you were afraid of him. You have been as afraid as I have, all the time; not only for a moment, as you said."
"No, I have not. And, after all, it only shows that I feel irritated in the presence of this man, who owns part of your past, and that I must hate him."
"That is just it, he owns my past, all that has any value in it, and he thinks it gives him a hold over me, which perhaps it does."
"Minna, Minna, what is it you are saying? "
"Oh, I am completely confused."
"Do you not know that you are mine, and I yours?"
She nodded slowly, while she gazed in front of her and pressed her lips together.
"And that you love me; don't you know that?"
Minna got up and embraced me tenderly.
"Yes, my beloved, that I know."
"Then there is nothing to doubt, not even as regards him. He knows you sufficiently to be sure that you would not submit to a marriage of convenience, and of me he knows that I am neither a duke nor a millionaire."
I spoke to her long and soothingly, while we were sitting on the little sofa with our arms round one another; it was so dark I could hardly see her. She seldom answered, and I doubted whether she really listened or whether her thoughts were completely wandering. Suddenly she pressed my hand and said—
"Let us go away from here, Harald! At once, to-morrow."
"Go away, but where to?"
"Out in the mountains, to Erzgebirge, to Blocksberg—anywhere!" And she laughed with the natural gaiety that was always ready to break out.
"Yes, but, Minna, would that be wise?"
"I dare do it. I have thought it all over—I have no relations for whose sake I need bother. I am my own mistress, and I dare."
"That is all very well, and I appreciate that you would in case of necessity ignore—ignore such ideas and formalities, but I think in this instance you ought to understand that your reputation is to me the most precious thing in the world, and I cannot see that it is a necessity."
"Indeed, indeed!" she exclaimed decidedly, almost violently. Whereupon she laid her lips to my ear and whispered in the most insinuating voice: "Let us, Harald; do say 'yes'!"
"Well, yes, dearest"
"Yes?"
"That is to say, suppose that we really were to leave to-morrow"
"Yes, yes, what then?"
"I have hardly any money, and I do not know how I, with so short a notice—I only know very few people here, the only one would be Hertz"
"No, for God's sake! Hertz! What would they say? I haven't given them a thought; how bewildered I must be!"
"Yes, there you are, and it really is an important step, which requires to be most thoroughly considered; one might suffer long for a hasty step."
The turn things had taken was rather welcome to me. I continued to speak soothingly to her, and already thought that I had got her quite away from her idea, when she suddenly said—
"Still, if we had money by us I would do it after all.… That money should have such power, it is really dreadful!"
At that moment her mother entered with a lamp, and I was struck by the expression of terror on Minna's face, perhaps exaggerated because of the sudden dazzling light. She seemed compelled to look towards the unavoidable fate, and I myself got a feeling of fear and discomfort as of impending danger, though I could not imagine that such was at hand. For, however painful it might be for poor Minna to receive Stephensen and listen to his undeserved reproaches and fruitless representations, it is the kind of thing one overcomes, and nothing in the whole affair seemed obscure to me.
I did not reveal my own secret forebodings, but so much the more allowed these reasonings to come to the fore. Minna seemed to agree with me.
As we spoke Danish the old woman felt de trop, and was just going to creep out in her quiet way when Minna begged her to stay, and began to talk Saxonian dialect and Dresden slang with her; and in this funny language she joked so gaily, and put on such peculiar faces, that I soon quite forgot the feelings which had so recently depressed us, and the mother laughed till the tears ran down her cheeks.
When the old woman fell asleep after tea, Minna sat down at the piano and played a berceuse by Chopin. She also began to play a waltz, but over this she broke down more than once.
"I am not in form," she said and came to me. "I prefer to read to you."
She took Käthchen von Heilbronn, which we had begun and hoped to see acted in a few days.
We soon came to the charming episode where Kätchen will not lift her skirt when wading over the brook, and the old man-servant shouts—
"Only to the ankles, child, to the extreme lowest edge of the sole, Kätchen," but she runs away in order to find a plank.
"Yes, Hertz was right when he called you a Kätchen," I interrupted her. "Do you remember at the quarry, when we were going up?"
"Oh, indeed, I can remember it. When you were so obstinate and nasty! And if only you could have imagined how comical you looked, as if you had got on a mask which did not fit at all"
Then she read the most touching and, in all its naïveté, the most profound love-scene which the whole of dramatic literature possesses: Kätchen reposing in a half-somnambulistic slumber under the elder bush, and answering the questions of the Count. "Verliebt ja, wie ein Käfer bist du mir" ("In love, yes, like a beetle are you").
"That is to you!" Minna exclaimed. "I could also have said that to you in those days."
We laughed and kissed one another.
After having read fluently for about half an hour, she suddenly stopped and blushed crimson; but I had hardly discovered this before I had the book hurled into my face; she had only meant to throw it from her, but, as I was seated just opposite, it had struck me; perhaps she also had involuntarily been annoyed because I had waited for her to continue.
"What have I done!" she exclaimed, starting up and throwing herself on her knees beside me. "What a wretch I am! Have I hurt you?"
I laughingly assured her that I was more surprised than anything else.
"I could not read it to you—why does he write such things? And I had not sufficient presence of mind to skip it."
I tried to take the book, but she snatched it up, and having smoothed out the crumpled leaves, she put it back in the bookcase.
"Poor man! You had to suffer for it!"
"Yes, just as I look up—Bang!"
And we burst into uncontrollable laughter. The old lady had shown some signs of waking up when the book had come into contact with my head, and our laughter thoroughly aroused her.
"You make such a rumpus, children, that we shall soon have the watchman up," she said. "It is already late. Oh dear me, yes! I wish I was in bed!"
She lit a little bit of a candle, which stood on the chest of drawers, and slouched out.
It was the hour at which I usually left, and I seldom stayed later because I knew that Minna had to get up early.
But she asked me to stay, for she said that she would not be able to sleep for several hours.
"I have read to you, now you might tell me tales," she said, and seated herself beside me on the little sofa. "I have told you so much about my own childhood, and have not heard nearly enough of yours. Do tell me."
I told her of the calm lonely life in a Ranger's home in the south of Zeeland. My mother I could hardly remember, but my recently lost father I described with all the grief which overwhelmed me by the thought that he would have come to love my Minna, and that she in him would have found a second father. He was in some ways rather peculiar, an old disciple of Schopenhauer, and a philosopher of nature; in consequence he was always quarrelling with the parsons of the neighbourhood, who had a craze to convert him. I shared his hermit life and, to the disgust of the neighbourhood, he brought me up in his free views.
Minna sang the part from the Valkyrie where Siegmund relates his youth:
"Friendless fled
My father with me;
Lapsed my youth
While living for years
With Wolfing in woodlands wild."
"By the way, have you wolves in Denmark?"
"Of course we have, and polar bears go about on skates there."
Minna slapped me over my fingers.
"After all, it was not impossible! They have wolves in Poland. I have stayed with a cousin who is married there, and have heard them howl. Yes, just you look at me, such an one am I!—By the way, why did you not take to forestry? I should have liked to be a forester's wife!"
"Well, you ought to have let me know in those days. But you forget, then we should not have met."
"Why not? You might have come to the college in Tharandt. Those who are to meet will meet."
"Fatalist!"
"Oh, you ought to know I am that! But, to be serious, I should think it would have suited you well."
"I also had a taste for it; it was only later I wanted to be an architect, and it had already been decided that I should be one when my mother's brother, who is a director of a large china-factory in London, offered to help me, if I would be a Polytechnic student. Well, it was more advantageous, and my father did not think we ought to lose the chance. Besides, he thought that it would be a good thing for me to take to a practical life, and not become such a lonely misanthrope and dreamer as he accused himself of being."
"I am sure you will be that all the same. You are my sweet enthusiast. And with all this you have not told me a word of those with whom you have been in love. Do you not know that it is the custom for all engaged couples at once to boast to one another of their former sweethearts? To have confessed before the engagement is an exception that confirms the rule, but you seem to imagine that you can break it altogether."
"Not at all. Be it confessed to you under seven-sealed promise of silence, that in my first youth I sighed in secret for the daughter of a forester."
"Well, it is quite an idyll!"
"No, only half a one. For she was so far from being a beauty that it often caused me an effort to keep up the illusion. But it seemed to me I ought to have some one whose initials I could cut on the bark of the trees with a burning heart above."
"Yes, afterwards you men can always speak with irony of your loves, and then it is for poor us to suffer. And who was the next one?"
"There wasn't another."
"What do you say? Look here, Harald, Harald!"
"Indeed, I assure you, none worth mentioning. Perhaps I have fancied some pretty face I have seen in the street. I may have had a dream or two and built castles in the air.…"
"Well, for those you are a splendid architect. But I feel certain that you are deceiving me."
"What makes you say so? Remember that I have had so little society, have met so few ladies."
"Yes, that may be the reason. Very likely that is why you care for me. When you discover that I am just like the others"
"But you are not."
"Well, you don't know!"
"I am sure of it, it's impossible.… And, after all, what do I care for the others?"
Minna laughed heartily and pressed me to her.
"That was well said, and it came from the heart, therefore you shall have a kiss … if only you would always think so! No, do not promise anything; what is the good of that? Kiss me!"
The tower clock on Kreuz Church struck twelve, it was quite time to part.
The outer door had, of course, been closed long before. Minna had to go down with me and open it. In the cool cellar-like corridor we gave one another a long embrace. I was not to detain her when she opened the door, but quickly slip out so that no passer-by or late neighbour should see her. But the draught blew the folds of her skirt out as she was about to bang the door, and while I helped to free her, I couldn't resist the temptation to steal one more kiss, in spite of the fact that I had seen a man on the opposite pavement.
The light from the little lamp, which she had put down in the corridor, shone round her dark figure with a flickering glare which suddenly went out.
"Good-bye, good-bye!" she whispered quickly, and the door closed.