THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
unusual degree, my exit was not quick enough. I found myself wedged in among the multitude pressing for the street, and suddenly in the swaying throng, a face turned toward me which I knew but too well for my comfort. It was that of a man who two years before had been a student at the university at Bonn, who had been a member of our democratic club, and who, by some exceedingly questionable transaction, had become suspected of acting for the police as a spy. I had heard of his presence in Berlin, and there, also, he was talked of among my friends as one whom it would be well to avoid. Now he looked at me in a manner clearly indicating that he recognized me, but as if he were astonished to see me there. I returned his gaze, as if I resented the impertinence of a stranger looking at me so inquisitively. So we stood face to face for a few moments, both unable to move. When the pressure of the crowd relaxed, I made the greatest possible haste to disappear among the passersby on the street. That was my last Rachel night in Berlin.
But I saw her again later in Paris, and still later in America. In fact, I have seen her in all her great characters, in not a few of them several times, and the impression was always identically the same, even during her American tour when her fatal ailment had already seized upon her, and her powers were said to be on the wane. Endeavoring to account more clearly for those impressions, I sometimes asked myself, “But is this really the mirror held up to nature? Did ever a woman in natural life speak in such tones? Have such women as Rachel portrays ever lived?” The answer I uniformly arrived at was that such questions were idle; if Phèdre, Roxane, Virginia ever lived, so they must have been as Rachel showed them; or, rather, Rachel in her acting was happiness, misery, love, jealousy, hatred, revenge, anger, rage—all these things
[ 282 ]
