CHAPTER XII.
I had now been more than a week at Zehrendorf. A letter written in those days now lies before me, a letter several pages long, upon which there are spots as if tears had fallen upon the paper, and yet it is a cheerful, even a merry letter, and these are the words of it:
"Nobody knows better than you, dear Paula, that I did not come here to amuse myself; but were I to say that in all these days I have done little else than amuse myself, or at least seem to be doing it, I should tell the honest truth. It really seems as if I were making up for lost time by perpetrating all the follies I have left undone during the last nine or ten years; and as taking my earlier exploits in that line as a standard, their amount and magnitude can by no means be insignificant, so my incentives to achieve them are proportionately strong. They still tell here of my performances in choral singing in our old parties on the water; of the dancing parties where I had ever the most inventive head for new figures in the cotillon, of the walks and drives in the pine-wood, where I was the leader in every frolic, and where in the evening the darkness of the forest would be lighted up by the fireworks that my friend and protégé, Fritz Amsberg, the apothecary's hunchbacked apprentice, used to make for me as his appointed tribute. Yes indeed, there are persons who remember only too well my exploits in those days; and what is the worst, some of these live in my immediate neighborhood, and are but too ready to say at all times, fitting or unfitting, 'Don't you remember, George--excuse me for calling you by the dear old name--don't you remember what a glorious time we had at such a place, where you had arranged so and so?' Not once in ten times can I remember it, and then only vaguely; and I marvel at the extraordinary tenacity with which the female memory retains certain things, which, with us men, the rougher waves of life ruthlessly wash away.
"Poor Emilie! What can have brought her here? Quite unexpectedly to me, I can assure you, and by no means agreeably either; but her father, my great enemy of old, is Justitiarius to Prince Prora, and the commerzienrath's solicitor; and as the prince and the commerzienrath are still in treaty about Zehrendorf, nothing of course can be done without the legal factotum of the two high contracting powers. Now wherever the legal factotum is, Fräulein Emilie is not far off, especially when in addition to business, a little innocent pleasure is to be had, as here with us in the country, where business and pleasure, whenever possible, go hand in hand. And now too, when the worthy lady, the Frau Justizräthin, has acted so unmotherly as to leave Emilie 'a helpless, unprotected orphan,' to use her own expression. And wherever Emilie is, one has not to look far for our mayor's lovely daughter, her bosom-friend, Elsie Kohl. Really I ought to be ashamed of making fun of these poor girls, for in truth it is not their fault that they have never been outside of the good town of Uselin and its three-mile circuit of estates and domains, so that their conceptions of the world and men's doings in it are not very comprehensive, but rather a little confused; and especially is it not Fräulein Emilie's fault that she did not find the person she was looking for--no, I ought not to laugh at them; and yet never could I have believed that my risible faculties could be brought into such play as happens when I look at the pair--the two Eleonoras somebody here has christened them--clasping each other in a girlish embrace, as they swim into the parlor through the door which William Kluckhuhn, with a malicious grin on his impudent face, has obsequiously thrown open for them. The attitude has, doubtless, been most carefully studied before the glass, or it could not always be so exact down to the very minutest detail. Here you have the group, which I recommend to you for one of your charming saloon-pieces:--Emilie, as the smaller and bolder, is naturally the second Eleonora, and is the worldly protector of the other who is a head taller and even in my time had a little romance with a poetical young schoolmaster who was a trifle out of his senses, so she has the superiority over her friend which riper experience and early sorrows bestow, especially as ten years ago she bewailed in elegiac verses her hapless fate, to fade, in the bloom of her youth, to the silent tomb.
"This sport of cruel destiny, the victim destined to an early grave, clasps her right arm around the shoulders of her friend, gazing down upon her with a loving look as if to say, Happy, guileless child! thou canst sing and sport in life's bright morning! while the guileless child looks up at her with two eyes, blue as two skies, at least, and with a provoking smile on her saucy lips. It is a touching sight, I assure you; and more than ever when one thinks that the combined ages of the two Eleonoras amount to some sixty-two or sixty-three years; for I remember quite distinctly that as a very little boy I would not play with Elise any more because she was too old for me, and as for Emilie I know certainly that she is exactly one year older than I am, for our birthdays fell on the same day, and used often to be celebrated together.
"Yes, the tenacity of Fräulein Emilie's memory is great, but there is one hour of her life of which she affirms that it is ever clouded in her recollections with a thick mist. And this very hour is so clear to me, that I can almost venture to name the exact number of curl-papers that quivered around her head when she lifted both her hands to me and supplicated me to spare her aged father, the same aged father who now nods confidentially to me across the table, with his full glass in his hand, and after dinner calls to me 'Prosit Mahlzeit,[[8]] my young friend! I would have liked to touch glasses with you, but I sat too far off; but you must really let me take your hand, you must indeed!' upon which follows a half embrace, if not a whole one. I assure you I sometimes take hold of my head to convince myself that this is not all an extraordinary dream. For you must know, Paula, that if I am not the fool of these festivities, I am not far from being the king of them; everything being done with reference to me, every one flattering me, and every one competing for my favor--with a single exception, of course. It is really edifying. There is my old friend, the little Herr von Granow, who has grown so much fatter with time that even in his best moments he can no longer lift his head from between his shoulders. Least of all can he when his spouse is by, a stout buxom brewer's daughter from S., who brought him a couple of hundred thousand thalers, which he takes care to get the good of, and a pair of slippers under whose heavy strokes they say the poor little fellow weeps many a hot secret tear. But disagree as they may on other points, the pair agree on this one of paying court to me in the most ridiculous manner in the world. The little man recalls with emotion 'The bright, the precious hours' that he once spent in my society, and sighing wishes those happy days back again, and that too in the presence of his over-buxom wife, who with a mock threat lifts a warning finger and says: 'O, you bad, bad man! But indeed I can understand how for such a friend one could even sacrifice the peace of the domestic hearth.'
"And then the steuerrath and the Born! I wrote you how they received me. Well, since then a grand council must have been held, and the decision come to to try other plans. The result is that the steuerrath, so soon as he sees me, holds out his hand to me, saying 'Glad to see you, George! You do not mind my calling the son of an old and too early lost colleague and friend, by his first name!' at which words the Born smiles benignant, and if the opportunity permits, takes my arm, draws me on one side and holds a long consultation with me about the apple of her eye, Arthur. Alas, the apple of her eye is giving her so much pain again, and grieves her so that, if one believed her assurances, she is often on the point of plucking it out of its aristocratic socket. But one must'nt believe her assurances, and I never do. It is just the old litany that I have known since I was a child: how Arthur is the best, cleverest, handsomest, wittiest, charmingest youth in the world, and has but one fault, that of hiding his thousand and one lights under the bushel of his frivolity, where, as is natural, they cannot produce their proper effect. Only that verse of the litany that referred to me, has taken an altogether different form. They used to be quite certain that I was at the bottom of all the unlucky scrapes that Arthur got into: now they are perfectly assured that I and I alone can save this stray lamb from the abyss. 'One who like you has borne the inevitable with dignity, one who like you has won the hardest victory, that over yourself, one who ----' well, I do not doubt that she is really anxious about her son's future, and as far as I can see, she has every reason to be; but so much the more do I doubt her good disposition towards me. I know too well what she and the steuerrath want of me! I know too well what Arthur, who comes over for awhile every day from Rossow, wants of me, when he sets all the fountains of his amiability to playing, and sprinkles me with a heavy spray of flatteries and protestations of friendship. And the worst of all--or should I say the best?--is that I know just as well what all the rest want; the little Herr von Granow, for instance, who would like to have the great estate of Zehrendorf, and wants me to speak a good word for him to the commerzienrath: William Kluckhuhn, who has received warning from his master, and wants me to ask that he may keep his place; and so they all have their special interests in persuading poor George that, all things considered, he is a young man of singular talents and remarkable influence, whose favor is very well worth winning.
"But seriously, dear Paula, it is a very curious position in which I find myself here; and I really do not know if they would not turn my head altogether, were not--well, were not a certain person here whose especial task it seems to be to set it right for me again. Or that is possibly the wrong expression: it would be more correct to say--to turn it in the other direction:--I am by no means an important personage whom any one need to consider; I am a quite obscure insignificant person, whom her father, heaven knows by what caprice, has invited to his house, and who therefore cannot exactly be shown the door, but who must be given to understand that people of his class really belong to very different society. I must be given to understand this by any and every means, some of the queerest in the world. I will tell you more about this when I come back: I fear the faces that they make here to me would look by far less handsome on the paper than they are in reality, and the little extravagances which they let themselves be drawn into, would, on the contrary, seem almost insane. Or are they really out of their senses? Sometimes it seems so to me, and I often cannot trust myself to pass a judgment on them, and wish that I had Benno here, or were myself Benno with his nineteen years, and his bright illusions. For his brown, enthusiastic eyes, I fancy, the blue-eyed enigma would be easier of solution than for an old lumpish fellow like me, with my nearly thirty years, my rough hands, and sluggish brain. Well, they will have to take the old fellow as they find him; and if they don't, they may worry and sulk and make pretty faces or ugly ones as they choose, it does not matter to me, does it, Paula?"
So ran the letter, which I wanted to seem a right cheerful, even merry one; and how well I attained my object the traces of the tears it drew from Paula's eyes may testify.
Well had she cause to weep over this letter! Had she deserved it at my hands that I should intentionally and artfully seek to conceal from her what really caused me so much inward emotion? And was not this letter from beginning to end a clumsy unsuccessful attempt to mislead her as to the real state of my feelings? How much of all this letter was the honest truth? Scarcely anything.
The whirl of amusements into which I was drawn here, had by no means left me so sober as I pretended. It was as if with breathing the same air I had breathed as a youth here ten years before I inhaled something of the buoyancy and love of pleasure of those days. The handsome rich house, the liberal easy life, the light joyous existence from day to day, the life in the open air, the wanderings over the heaths, on the cliffs, through the woods, and with all these the glorious spring weather, with warm gales, the forerunners of summer, now and then sweeping through the blossoms all this charmed and intoxicated me. No, I was not the sober, cheerful, untroubled fellow, that I represented myself to Paula, and tried to make the company believe me. I was not sober, and far less was I cheerful and careless--quite the contrary. A restless, passionate humor, now depressed and now over-excited, had taken possession of me, to such an extent that sleep, my true comrade from childhood, now forsook me, just as it forsook me at the commencement of my imprisonment; and this perhaps was in part the cause of another feeling of that old time often coming over me: the feeling of one who knows that a decision involving his life or death, is now hanging by a hair.
What of all this had I written to Paula? But how could I write to her? Could I write to her that I believed that I knew the reason why Hermine kept playing, in ever strange and more fantastic form, the game which she had commenced with me on my arrival at Zehrendorf? And if something in me continually recoiled from giving the right explanation to Hermine's singular conduct, could I really altogether shut my eyes when all took pains to show me and make clear to me that they saw perfectly well what I was determined not to see, or at least gave myself the appearance of not seeing? Yes, it was a singular and unnatural position in which I found myself, a position in which we write that kind of merry letters to our friends over which our friends weep hot tears.