V.
One winter evening as he was brooding over his sad plight his landlady informed him that some one wanted to see him.
“I don’t want to see anybody—leave me alone!” he finally cried irritably.
“I’ve tried to send her away but she insists on seeing you—she has come all the way from Poland to see you,” came the landlady’s voice through the closed door.
He jumped up from his bed. He could not even guess who this intruder might be but the word Poland was magic to him, and it was a “she”! Perhaps it was an admirer from that fateful land. The hope of an admirer stirred romance in his soul. He wondered which of his scattered songs had found an echo in the heart of a Polish admirer. Yes, he was becoming famous! The stray children of his brain were traveling far. He opened the door with a flush of joy on his face.
He rushed downstairs to the sitting-room, dimly lighted by a tallow candle. By the door stood a slender girl shivering with cold. He took a step closer to her.
“Miriam!” he cried.
She rushed up to him, tears welling in her luminous dark-blue eyes.
“How did you get here?”
His joy and confusion were bewildering.
“I had your address so I came here,” she murmured in the tone of a helpless child.
He made her sit down and tell him how she had happened to leave Gnesen.
The Beadle had told her father about her and also communicated the scandal to the rest of the community. A committee called on her father and urged that she be sent away from town lest the other girls might be contaminated. The father had almost yielded when his wife prevailed upon him to allow the disgraced daughter to remain at home. But there was no more chance of getting Miriam married. Who would have her now? Life had become unbearable for the poor girl. However, the resourceful marriage-broker had soon found a way out of the dilemma. He knew of a young man, a drover’s son, in a village nearby, who was willing to have Miriam in spite of the stigma. When Miriam was told of the match she seemed indifferent. But two days after the betrothal—it was on a Saturday morning when her parents were at services—Miriam went to her mother’s bed, lifted the heavy feather-bed, and removed from underneath a little packet which contained the family savings for her dowry and trousseau, and unobserved made her way out of town. After many days of travel by foot and by coach, she reached her destination, clutching in her hand the address that Albert had scribbled on a piece of paper.
“And at last I’m near you,” she said with a heaving sigh as she concluded her simple narrative, her eyes turning appealingly upon her perplexed lover.
Albert at once thought of Rahel. He must go to her and place his predicament before her. He was helpless.
Rahel was not only helpful but magnanimous. She received Miriam into her home, clothed her in dresses that were then in vogue, and shared the thrill of romance. Though she had often bandied Albert about his peculiar notions of feminine beauty she was forced to admit that Miriam was adorable. In her Berlin attire no one would have taken her for a native of Gnesen. Her innate modesty, her truthfulness, her sweet temper, her want of city mannerisms, fascinated the woman of the world surfeited with the artifices of society.
At first even Frau Varnhagen, with all her bitter experiences of her younger days, did not think of the consequences of the present situation. She only thought of the poor girl’s plight, of the poet’s love, of the sweet romance acted before her eyes. To her it was an idyll of rare charm.
But before long the sordid facts stared her in the face. When she spoke of this to the lover he saw no problem in it at all.
“Why, I love her as I’ve never loved anybody in the world,” he burst out impulsively.
Rahel, leaning back in her fauteil, her hand thoughtfully raised to her temple, looked enviously at the dreamy youth. She caught the rapture of his soul. To love, and be loved, like this!
“But, my dear Zorn, what good will come of her indefinite stay here—to what end?”
“Why, I’ll marry her, of course, I’ll marry her,” he spoke impulsively.
Frau Varnhagen leaned forward and smiled indulgently. She wondered if he ever would grow up. He was already twenty-five and in many ways a mere child.
“One needs money to support a wife—love alone is not enough.” She paused. She would not intimate that he was living on the charity of his uncle and that he was heavily in debt to many of his friends. Then she added, “It’ll be several years before either your pen or your jurisprudence will crystallize into Louis d’ors. What will become of this beautiful flower in the meantime—what will become of Miriam?”
But while Frau Varnhagen was attempting to put reason into the poet’s mind she directed the course of the fates more successfully. She called the count and counselled with him. Shortly thereafter, the rabbi came to Berlin and the count interceded between father and daughter; and before Albert was aware Miriam had disappeared.
Poor Albert Zorn! What were Werther’s Leiden compared with his? Werther had only sorrows of love to bear, but he, indeed, like another Atlas, was bending under the weight of a whole globe of sorrows. The Weltschmerz was gnawing at his heart. The furies of a thousand storms were lashing him at once. Disappointment everywhere! No appreciative public, no one would look at his poetic drama, at his tragedy; his essay on Poland had only provoked his enemies without a word of praise from his friends; and his love-dream—the sweetest dream of life—shattered. And, then, the Judenhetze was corroding his heart. Like Frau Varnhagen, he wished to dismiss the memory of his birth but he could not. Rahel was a philosopher, not a poet, her life was dominated by willpower, but he was only mere gossamer driven by the cruel winds. He could reason even more clearly than Rahel, but reason did not calm his sensitive nerves, did not quiet his raging blood.
He had grown weary of Berlin. He wanted to flee. Everybody here reminded him of his unbearable sorrows. He was weary of Prussia and Prussianism and wished he could leave the land of his birth. Like one suffering from defective lungs, he blamed the air for his hard breathing. The present air was stifling him. He had intimated to his uncle that he wished to leave Germany and go to England or America or France but Uncle Leopold would not listen to such a proposition. Uncle Leopold felt that since he was paying the fiddler it was his privilege to dictate the dances. The banker felt that jurisprudence was the only hope for his incorrigible nephew.
However, he decided to leave Berlin. Here he could not give his undivided attention to his studies because of many diversions. He realized that while he was a law student he was giving too much time to Hegel’s lectures on philosophy and to the reading of belles lettres. He would never complete his law course that way. Yes, he must return to that “scholarly hole” of Goettingen, though he shuddered as he remembered that college town.
He left Berlin with no regrets in his heart.