Minna/Book 5, Chapter 4
In Dresden I went at once to "Seilergasse." Mrs. Jagemann had long since moved away, and the people in the house did not know where she lived. I looked sorrowfully at the summer-house in the little garden, where everything was unchanged, and I went to "zur Katze" in order to ask whether the widow Jagemann still came there. Here they knew more; Minna's mother had been dead for two years.
I walked round the town, it was to me an indispensable enjoyment to look up our precious spots; not all were untouched by time. On the terrace they had pulled down the dear little Café Torniamenti with its naïve columns, where I had got the idea to go to Rathen, and where we had met Stephensen; the streets, through which we had wandered the last time we walked together, did not exist any longer, and one could hardly find traces of them in the new quarter of pretentious buildings. In Grosser Garten and the Park the buds of the bushes began distinctly to show green—we were at the end of March—and everything looked different; but on the black stems I still read the same names on the labels, which in those days we had studied together, one having a very exotic name, which most likely was easy enough in the mouth of a Maori or Tahitian, but the pronunciation of which had caused Minna to make the most comical grimaces. I remained standing there for a very long time, staring at these dry branches, and twigs, and on this little label as if it was a riddle that had to be solved, but that defied solution. And really I had a feeling of not being able to grasp the whole thing; I did not understand that this plant still stood here and had the same unpronounceable name, understood still less that I myself was here and, least of all, that Minna was not here, or that I couldn't go to "Seilergasse" and embrace her. I realised nothing at all.
When at last I turned round, I saw some children a few yards away putting their heads together, laughing and running away. Evidently they thought that I was mad. And who knows? From children one hears the truth!
On my way back I passed the beautiful Renaissance Villa, which Minna and I jokingly had called ours. A new riddle! In those days it had been a matter of course that we two should build a home together, but it was a wild and ridiculous dream that we should ever be able to do it on such a grand scale. And now there was more possibility of my being able to buy this building than of taking Minna to the most modest home. Incomprehensible! Was this perhaps already a madness, that I had a feeling of not being able to understand anything, where I suppose in reality there was nothing to understand, where everything for a cool brain was clear as daylight, had to be so, and for me it could not be. Madness! Sonnenstein! And why not? "If I am lodged there," I thought, "it will always be an advantage that no Napoleon will come to drive one out."
At sunset a signal shot sounded, which announces that the Elbe rises unusually. The next morning, when I still lay in a half-slumber, I was alarmed by a second shot, by which the danger of flood is foretold. I got up at once. As I was staying at the Bellevue Hotel, I was quite close to the river. Since last evening, the porter said, people had been on the bridge amusing themselves all the night through by watching the rising of the water, and the parapet was now quite black with the crowd. But this bridge itself, which usually was lifted so proudly on its high pillars over the river, now only showed the arches spanning the muddy mass that dashed along, not like water but like a torrent of lava, whirling and grinding, covered with overturned yawls, beams and timber, barrels and bushes, which tossed, went under and came up again. I made my way to the bridge. The whole quay had disappeared and also the little stretch of meadow in front of Neustadt; over there the gardens were under water, and on this side waves foamed and whirled up against the terrace wall.
"Oh, our poor little Rathen," I thought, "what does it look like there? I wonder if the dear house, where we have experienced so much together, is flooded, perhaps even washed away."
I could not resist my desire to know what had happened, and a few hours later the train brought me to Pirna; in Saxonian Switzerland itself there was not any possibility of crossing the Elbe. When I had passed over the bridge, I turned and glanced at the town: I had not seen it since that day on the outer journey to Rathen, when it had shown itself in the frame of the cabin window, shining and wet from the summer rain, with a promising light over the gables of Sonnenstein. Now the town and the sombre fortress inhabited by the feeble-minded, lay in sunlight, but it was a cold, cheerless light that contained no suggestion of Spring.
I walked over Dorf-and Stadt-Wehlen and up through the famous Zscherre-Grund, which is passed by all tourists, but was now deserted. The intimate Saxonian mountain landscapes, with their baroc and steep shapes, moved me deeply and at the same time—strange to say—vexed me. I wished, or anyhow I thought I did so, that one of these overhanging rocks would fall down and crush me. At about four o'clock I at last reached the Bastei, stepped out on the plateau and saw the awful devastation under my feet.
Of Erbgericht's Terrace there were only the tops of the maples over the water, looking like big shrubs on the edge of the stream, which had almost entirely swallowed up its rival the "Rosengarten." Between them the river had flooded the Rathen valley, which usually discharged its modest brook into it. The three little houses, which behind some twigs of the "Rosengarten" were squeezed in between the immovable rock and the tearing stream, presented a miserable appearance. The first one was half under water; the quarry owner's house, which lay a little higher and besides had a base of about six feet, had still its entrance door free, but only for one who did not mind a bath; the water foamed against the hidden stone steps as against a reef. The little summer-house, where we had sat so often, had been torn away. The third house was even more under water. Thanks to my good travelling-glass I saw all this quite distinctly. On the flat opposite bank, round which the river curved, there was nothing to remark, except that it had receded and that the grass grew out into the water without any decided border line.
A sad sight, so much the more as it had nothing wild in it. Seen from this dominating point the unnaturally broad river seemed, I won't say not to rush, but not even to hasten; one only perceived the enormous irresistible moving mass. Calm and peaceful it had in those days glided by our idyll, as the moving life, occupied with its own concerns, streams past the happy existences that desire nothing from it; it had broken into this idyll, destroying and washing it away; but passionless it had exercised its work of destruction, and indifferently it rushed by—like life—like fate!
A cold wind blew, it had clouded over, now it even began to snow a little. A miserable, depressing outlook, but I would not have exchanged it for a glance over a smiling landscape, through which streamed the broad thoroughfare of a frequented river. In this way I could bear to see Rathen again. I was also content to have never been on these heights with Minna.
A prosaic circumstance prevented me, however, from giving myself up too much to this elegiac mood; I was almost ill with hunger. When I had satisfied my appetite, I thought it was too late to go down to Rathen, and I postponed it to the next day. I went down towards the Elbe by a forest path, which branches off from the descent to Rathen, but is indicated as a "forbidden path." The rough forester came into my head, and I wished I could meet him. This footpath would take me to the one that Minna and I had trodden on the way home from the stone-quarry. But the penetrating wind, which splashed the ever-increasing fall of thawing snow into my face, the farther I came down, soon made me return. Up on the height it surely was easy enough to find shelter, but it was disagreeable everywhere, and I myself was less melancholy than annoyed: this whole expedition seemed to me to be a folly. As soon as the colourless sun had set I retired to my room, where there was a horrible draught, and at last went to sleep lulled by the monotonous cradle song of soughing pines.
I woke up to find a real spring morning. The view was not changed, but I was told that the river had begun to fall. When I was on the point of leaving, a lonely visitor got up from the table, and said, "I say, is it you, Mr.—Professor! Didn't I think so!" It was the schoolmaster, Mr. Storch. I do not know whether I felt pleased or annoyed to see him, but surely enough I wished him at the bottom of the Elbe when it was evident that he intended to stick to me like a leech and wanted to come with me. He had given a holiday on account of the flood, and had now gone up to Bastei to "get an overlook." There was nothing else to do but to accept his company. I had not time to postpone the trip, unless I had once more stayed the night at Bastei.
"Look, you will get company for dinner, it might even be a whole table d'hôte," he exclaimed, while we were going down towards the bridge, and pointed back to a landau, which a couple of steaming horses drew up in front of the hotel. "They have come from Pirna, I know the conveyance; the proprietor of it is a regular shark, he makes the travellers pay a pretty penny."
A lady's hat appeared out of the window and allowed a long black veil to fly to one side.
"I say, there are also ladies. A young one, I bet; that's something for you."
"Now come along," I said irritably, and hurried out to the rock-bridge.
The first part we descended with rapid steps. When we came to more even ground, he began, as I had expected, at once to speak about Minna, pretending not to know that we had been engaged, as indeed perhaps he did not.
"I suppose you remember Minna Jagemann? I am sure you do; I saw myself how you flirted with her on the forest path.… Well, and right you were.… Now, just imagine, after all, she got married to that painter of whom I told you, your countryman, but 'give a dog a bad name,' you know. I suppose you haven't forgotten that I told you that she had had a sort of"
"Yes, yes, I remember it quite well."
"And you have not seen her in Denmark? The country is not so very big."
"I have lived all the time in England."
"Oh, I see! I always thought you had got something English about you."
I made him talk about the flood and the damage it caused the poor people, and he told me that in all probability only the two innkeepers and the owners of the three houses by the river would suffer any loss.
When we came down into Rathen itself, I bade him good-bye, allowing the "English" side of my nature to come to the fore, so that the honest German did not feel inclined to force himself upon me any longer.
The flood of the Elbe had not proceeded so far, but the brook was very swollen. The simple planks that led over it were, however, still undisturbed. I went over to the Zedlitz Villa, which, of course, was closed, came past the little birch avenue, and stood suddenly at my destination, the grotto "Sophien-Ruhe." The benches had been taken in; I sat down on the stone table. The birds twittered gaily round me, the bushes breathed the soft spring air with their little green gills, and the buds of the trees showed white in the sunshine against the blue sky.
Again I had that queer feeling of not being able to understand anything: I neither understood that I was here nor that she was not here. Into my head came the remembrance of the little glow-worm, which evening after evening had sat on the same corner of the stone steps, signalling for a mate; and it seemed to me that if I could only sit here, concentrating all my will-power on my loss, I should be able through the compulsion of nature to enchant Minna to me.
It is said that a dying person is able to review, in a second, his whole life in all its main lines, as if his consciousness was already elevated above the earthly order of time. At this moment my youth died in me, and I reviewed in parting the whole course of my love, all that I have confided to these pages, and still many more half-forgotten incidents. It appeared to me that I saw it all in a flash and from above, just as I had overlooked the whole of its birthplace from the platform of Bastei. And in taking this review, one thing struck me which I had not remarked before, the fact that we had all allowed ourselves to be led and driven almost mechanically by the stream of circumstances, without striking in energetically with a "So it must be!" Even Stephensen's way of behaving, that had certainly had the appearance of spontaneity, had in its essence the same character; he had evidently given in to his jealous longing to see Minna before she was irrevocably lost, and had thought: "Let us see what I can manage. Who knows! Perhaps, after all, she will come with me."
But now? Could nothing be altered? Was there not yet time to step in with an "I will"? A marriage is not any longer an indissoluble tie, hers was an unhappy one. I knew more certainly than any words of hers could have told me that all she had hoped for was irreparably lost, that he was found out, weighed and found wanting; while he, on his part, had long since tired of her. Besides, he was, as he often enough had boasted, a man who did not share the usual prejudices, and I suppose he, least of all, would insist that an unsuccessful union could not rightly be dissolved, or that it was justifiable to bind a wife who stayed against her will. Surely the theories of liberty are not always welcome, when they go against the men of liberty themselves. But even if his vanity shrank, could he in the end oppose, when she would and when I would?
Would she? She had made the trial, and it had failed. Why not give up the impossible to realise the possible? That she had guarded her love and confidence in me I felt with an unswerving certainty.
Would I? Yes, I would! I said it for the first time in our relations with one another, said it with triumphant joy. To-morrow evening I could be in Copenhagen, and the day after speak with her.
Strange indeed is the dream-nature in human beings! Never, perhaps, in those days, when I had Minna at my side, had I felt so happy as in this moment, when I looked back on our first youthful love and forwards to its consummation in a tested matrimonial love, and these two parts in my will united into a single life.
So true are the myths about "Paradise lost" and "Paradise regained": happiness is a remembrance and a hope.