CHAPTER XX.
Perhaps that isolated life which is the ideal of a young married pair, when from any causes its realisation by an abode upon a desert island is found to be impracticable, can nowhere be better realised than in a very large, populous city. It all depends upon one's possessing the secret of creating an isle here, past whose shores the restless tides of social life roll away. The thorough mastery of this art is greatly facilitated to the adept, when the great world, as often happens, has no special motive to trouble itself about him; the heart of the mystery lies in the other and harder condition, that he shall not trouble himself about the world.
The first of these conditions had already been very satisfactorily fulfilled in my case. The world had interested itself amazingly little about the young machinist while he pursued his laborious but valuable studies in the ruinous house standing in the ruinous court. He resembled at all points Lessing's wind-mill which went to nobody and nobody came to it, and which simply ground the corn that was thrown into the hopper. But now the case was very different; that court was no longer a wilderness of rubbish. The ruins had been cleared away, or built up into stately buildings; the wall which had separated the two lots was pulled down and the old factory united with the new into a single great arena for industry and activity. This was a great change, which was much discussed, gladly welcomed by some, scornfully criticised by others, but which still made scarcely so much talk as the change in my own fortunes.
From the obscure chrysalis of an ordinary machinist, had been developed that splendid butterfly, the ruling chief of this great new establishment, and this enviable butterfly was the son-in-law of a millionaire, the husband of a young wife whose striking beauty excited the envy of women, the admiration of men, and attracted the attention of all wherever she appeared. To so notable a metamorphosis even the blasé public of a metropolis could not be indifferent, and when so remarkable a person, over whose past life there circulated the most various and scarcely credible legends, determines to baffle the curiosity directed to him from all sides, he must understand and practise arts undreamed of by him in his former obscure pupa-state.
I cannot say that in the practice of an art so new to me I always succeeded, or was at all times favored by fortune.
After spending a fortnight at Zehrendorf, we had returned to the city and rented a set of apartments by no means expensive, but still pleasant and roomy, the only objection I had to which was that they lay too far from the factory, but which by no means suited Hermine, who had always been accustomed to having a house of her own. Now, as I knew and shared Hermine's wish in this respect, I thought I would please her, and at the same time realize a favorite dream of my own, if with the assistance of my good friend the architect, I very quietly, but with as much expedition as possible, restored the house I had so long occupied, to its original design, and by help of the old plan, turned it into a charming little villa. I had to use an infinity of stratagems to keep the secret a month, and I felt really childlike, as after returning from a winter trip with Hermine to Zehrendorf, I found everything complete and according to my wishes. In the joy of my heart I embraced my friend the architect who had shown himself so tasteful a decorator, and blessed the day when I should bring Hermine from her hated city lodgings to this little paradise.
"You dear boy," said Hermine, as on the day after her return I showed her with triumph my new creation, "you dear boy, that is all very pretty and nice, and in the summer, for a couple of weeks or months which we have to pass in this wretched town and not in Zehrendorf, it will be a very nice place to stay; but now, in the middle of winter--no, George, it will never do! It makes me shiver to think of it. And then the great bare buildings around, and the tall chimneys that look as if they would topple over on our heads every minute--that one does lean a little--just look at it--I could not sleep here a single night in peace. And you are already too fond of the horrible noise and confusion around us here, so that the thought will come into my head that you might change into some frightful great machine yourself. No, you must mix more among men, go into society; you must begin at last to have a little pleasure of your life, you poor, overworked man! And you can do this better in our old lodgings; so I think we will spend the winter there. The rent is paid in advance, anyhow, and we must be economical, as all young beginners should. Have I not heard that out of your own distinguished mouth, sir? And now put down your distinguished mouth and give me a kiss, and that settles the matter."
Of course that settled the matter; for I had really planned the whole for Hermine's sake rather than my own. And if she really wished to make a pleasure-trip or two from our lonely island upon the sea of city life, I was certainly not the man to say no. Indeed I saw perfectly that in my present position I was in duty bound to perform certain social duties, if not for my own pleasure, at least in the interest of my business, and that I had already some derelictions in this respect to make good.
So I returned without a sigh to our city-lodgings, and while we were at dinner we drew up, with much merriment, a list of the influential persons upon whom, as Hermine said, we would make our first social experiment.
I cannot say that this experiment was crowned with very brilliant success. True we were most kindly met, and I for my part took all possible pains--and as I flattered myself, not unsuccessfully--to play the agreeable host; and Hermine had really no need to take pains to be the most charming of the company. Upon this point there seemed, so far as a young husband can judge in such a matter, to be but one opinion. The gentlemen were full of sincere admiration of her beauty, her manners, and whatever else is attractive in a young and charming woman; and if the admiration of the other sex was not altogether so sincere, they knew how to give it so enthusiastic an expression that it needed a much readier wit than I could boast of to find always a fit answer to all the handsome things that were whispered to me about my wife.
"What makes you so charming?" I used to say to her sometimes, when we came home after one of these social experiments, and Hermine was walking up and down our sitting-room in her full evening dress, as she had a way of doing, stopping now and then to strike a few chords on the piano, while I leaned back in the rocking-chair smoking my beloved cigar.
Then she would suddenly stop, and begin to take off the company we had just left, in the most amusing and wittiest style of caricature. There was Privy-Councillor Zieler, our banker, who kept perpetually glancing down at three family-orders at his button-hole, which had been graciously bestowed on him by three small princely houses in return for his services in negotiating a loan for them; there came his lady rustling along in the heaviest of satins, her snub nose turned up to the chandeliers, in whose light the diamonds that decked her bosom glanced so splendidly; and behind the corpulent mamma floated the sylph-like daughter, all gauze and Ess. Bouquet and fond memories of the three court-balls at the three princely houses. Here was the Railroad Director Schwelle, who would not talk before supper, in order not to excite himself, had no time to talk during supper, and after supper was in no condition for talking. Here were the two Misses Bostelmann, the intellectual daughters of our host--a wealthy contractor for building-stone--between whom Hermine had sat awhile, during which time the one entertained her unremittingly with Heine, while the other, with equal persistence and enthusiasm discoursed of Lenau.
"Heine--Lenau; Lenau--Heine! It was enough to drive one wild!" cried Hermine. "And that they call pleasure! Would you venture to maintain that doctrine, Sir?"
"I made no assertion of the kind, Madam!"
"Indeed! And why then do you drag your poor little wife among these horrible people, and rob her of the happy hours that she might spend in a delightful tête-à-tête with her monster of a husband? Is that right? Is that the love that you vowed to me in the St. Nicholas church at Uselin before all the assembled population? Heine--Lenau; Lenau--Heine! Oh!"
I laughed, and then suddenly became grave, and the remark rose to my lips that it was perhaps not difficult to prove that we could find no pleasant people to live with, if we did not choose to live with those that we really liked.
And where were at this time the people who were really dear to me?
The good Fräulein Duff, Hermine's most faithful friend, was with her relations in Saxony. She had only gone on a short visit, for eight weeks at the furthest, and the eight weeks had lengthened to as many months. Where was Paula? Eight hundred miles away, under another sky, which I trusted shone as brightly on her as she deserved. It had been now five months since Paula, with her mother and her youngest brother, Oscar, and accompanied, as a matter of course, by old Süssmilch, had taken a journey to Italy.
"Had to go," said Doctor Snellius. "What would you have, sir? It was an unavoidable necessity. An artist like Paula cannot possibly develop her talents here, in this small, petty, narrow, dark land of fog. Sunshine, light, air, those were what she needed. Venice, Rome, Naples, Capri--what do I know? I was never there; shall never go there; wouldn't know what to do there; but she knows well, and we shall know it and see it at the next Exposition, when people will make pilgrimages to her pictures as if they were miracles. Her mother too, that angel of a woman, will feel the benefit of a residence in a milder climate, and as for that young fellow Oscar, a young crocodile like him cannot be put into the water too soon. It is only in the water that one learns to swim, sir! Only in the water, even when one is born a crocodile, that is, has such an incredible talent as that youngster has. It will cost a fabulous sum, to be sure; but she can afford it now, thank heaven, and after all it is golden seed which will bring forth fruit a hundred and a thousand fold. She felt some hesitation on this point, but I persuaded her into it, and she writes me in her last letter--where did I put it? I want to show you what she says; well, it is no matter; I will show it to you the next time, if you remind me--anyhow she writes me so happily, so very happily, that it even made me happy. God bless her!"
This was the way the doctor talked to me, shortly after Paula's departure, which happened early in October, when I had been married three months, during a journey which I had to make to St. ---- on business, and on which Hermine accompanied me. "For you know," said the doctor, "in such cases one must take advantage of an opportunity, as Nature does, when for example she separates soul and body by a stroke of apoplexy or paralysis of the heart while the patient sleeps, or when the band connecting both has been sufficiently loosened by long sickness, so that the parting is scarcely painful, and sometimes is even longed for. It would perhaps have been a hard trial for poor Paula to leave you, had she gone from your presence direct to the railroad-car; but it happened that you were not there, and whether there are eighty or eight hundred miles between you makes very little difference."
"When she separates soul and body." This was one of the physiological illustrations which the doctor was fond of introducing into his discourse, but it struck me strangely. I looked him fixedly in the eye, and by an energetic effort he tuned down his voice a couple of octaves, and continued in a more indifferent tone:
"And then a temporary separation will not only be beneficial to them, but it will be a good thing for the boys that stay behind. It is time Benno and Kurt were cutting loose from their sister's apron-strings. Young men must learn to think and care for themselves, and to stand upon their own feet. I know that from my own experience. Had my old father sent me to Bonn or Heidelberg, instead of shutting me up here for four years under the shadow of his church-steeple in the old worm-eaten superintendent's house, I might have spread my wings better, and would not have been the cross-patch I am now; that is, if any man who has been christened Willibrod--Willibrord it should be correctly--out of love for an ancestor who has been in his grave these two hundred years, has any chance left to be anything but a cross-patch and oddity."
The letter in which Paula wrote to the doctor how happy she felt in that far-distant land, I never succeeded in getting a sight of. The next time he had forgotten it; and after awhile I grew used to the doctor's regularly wanting to show me the letters which Paula wrote him from Venice, Rome, and Naples, and as regularly leaving them at home.
I do not know why it was that I always felt a singular confusion whenever the doctor began one of his fruitless searches for Paula's letter, and why I always tried to get him upon another subject as soon as possible. Not that I had any doubt of Paula's alleged happiness. The short and unfrequent letters which she wrote to Hermine and myself conveyed no intimation to the contrary; but I was by no means quite assured as to the source from which that happiness flowed, and the letters, whether addressed to myself or to Hermine, had all the same physiognomy, in which I could only here and there recognize a trace of the beloved features of Paula. And the longer the separation lasted, the shorter and fewer were these letters, so that they were nearly as brief and rare as the doctor's visits.
"It must be so," said the doctor, as I once assailed him with friendly reproaches on this point; "a young married pair is like a young plant, which thrives best when put under a bell-glass, and meddled with as little as possible. Men call Love a goddess;[[9]] but to me it appears a god; a stern, inapproachable, jealous god, that will endure no rivals, and who puts to the sword all colleagues that he may find in his chosen realm, be they lovely Astartes or hideous Mumbo-Jumbos. And he is quite right to do so; the human heart is a stubborn, cross-grained affair, and takes a frightfully long time in learning merely to spell through the ten commandments."
The doctor always said things of this sort in a very kind tone, the same that I heard him use in speaking to his patients, and was at all times full of friendliness and attention, even more towards my wife than myself. Indeed a peculiar relation seemed to have been established between Hermine and him. She, with her usual impulsiveness, had at first made no secret of the dislike with which she regarded my old friend, and often enough ridiculed, even in his presence, his odd eccentric ways. But the man who on other occasions had the keenest arrows in his quiver ready for any aggressor, let him be who he might, and who did not lightly grant quarter to an antagonist, on no occasion used his powerful weapons against her; and this gentleness which nothing could change, and which was assuredly not always easy for the hot and caustic temper of the man, succeeded at last, however she might resist, in touching and captivating Hermine. Perhaps this happy result may have been in part owing to the fact that lately she had received the doctor not only as my friend, but as her medical adviser.
"He is really too good!" she said more than once, looking thoughtfully at the door through which the odd figure of my old friend had just vanished.
"There is not much the matter with your wife," said the doctor to me, when I expressed some uneasiness at Hermine's altered looks. "But she has been used from childhood to freer exercise and fresher air than can be had in a city like this."
"I would with pleasure take her to Zehrendorf," I said; "but now it is winter; and how can I possibly leave here?"
"Well, as it is an impossibility, we will not rack our brains any more about it," replied the doctor. "We must do the best we can. Sometimes mental activity may, to a certain point, make up for the deficiency of physical. It is a pity that your wife was so soon satiated with the bustle of society. Why do you not take her sometimes to the theatre or the opera? She is so great a lover of music."
"I do not care to go to the opera any more," said Hermine, after we had tried it a few times. "They sing badly and play worse. Now could you call that a Zerlina? And that Don Juan! You might have waited for me long enough, if you had been such a stick of a lover as that! And with such monstrous self-conceit to boot! Masetto was really the better man."
"Try the theatre once," said the doctor.
I looked him full in the eyes.
"The Bellini has been back a week," he added, and brought his round spectacles to bear upon me. We looked at each other awhile in silence.
"Your wife does not know that Fräulein Bellini and a certain other lady are one and the same person?" he presently asked.
"No," I answered.
"And you are not willing to tell her? Not willing to tell her what I know, who am your friend, and what very probably others know, who are not your friends?"
"It is a peculiar sort of thing, doctor."
"There are many peculiar things, especially in a new married life."
"Which one would do more wisely to keep to himself."
"Not in all cases," replied the doctor. "Whatever can be communicated, should be, always; and there is but little, hardly anything, which a young husband should not tell his wife. In a river crawling sluggishly between sandy shores to the end of its course, every stone lies unmoved; but a stream bursting fresh and joyous from the mountain will roll and whirl along heavy masses of rock, its young strength sweeping everything before it. Think it over, my dear friend."
I had thought it over, but I could not bring myself to follow the doctor's advice. It was not cowardice that kept me silent, but rather a feeling of shame that I could not overcome, and a fear of the consequences upon a character so peculiar as Hermine's, and in her present state of health. And yet the revelation hovered more than once upon my lips, but crept back again to my heart, that beat uneasily when in almost every number of the papers I came across the ominous name, and Hermine once or twice said casually. "We ought really to see this Bellini they talk so much about."
They did indeed talk much about her. "Are you a Bellinist or an anti-Bellinist?" was the question in all salons: "the Bellini is a marvel," "the Bellini is nothing at all," said the papers. I did not know which party was right, nor wish to know; and right glad was I that Hermine seemed as little curious in the matter as myself, until one day, when I had replied, in answer to her question, that I was disengaged that evening, she startled me by saying:
"Then we will go this evening and see the Bellini."
"If you wish," I answered, with the determination of a man who sees that he has met a fatality that is too strong for him.
And we went to the theatre and saw Ada Bellini as Juliet in Shakespeare's tragedy. I cannot assert that I felt any inclination to join in the enthusiastic applause that was lavished upon the actress by the crowded house, nor in the hisses that were occasionally heard, but only to be overwhelmed by fresh plaudits. Nor can I say that in the course of the evening I found myself able to pass a critical judgment upon the artist. However attentively I watched the stage, I saw little more than if I had gazed at vacancy, dreaming of times long past, and wishing at intervals that this evening also belonged to past time, I remember that once arousing from this unpleasant reverie and looking at Hermine, I caught her eye fastened upon me with a mysterious expression; but she only jested at my indifference as we drove home, and declared that the question of Bellinist and anti-Bellinist was settled for her.
"With what result?" I asked, lighting my cigar from the lamp.
"And are you going to smoke now, you unfeeling man? Do you suppose that Romeo would have poisoned himself if he had had a cigar in his pocket with the fatal flask? Much good may your cigar do you, dear Romeo: Juliet will bid you good-night."
This evening for the first time I smoked my nightly cigar alone; and never did I smoke one in deeper reflection.
"The doctor was right," I said to myself, as I threw the stump into the dying coals on the hearth, and rose with a sigh from my easy-chair; "perfectly right. I must wait for a favorable opportunity."
But as it usually happens in such cases, a week passed, two weeks passed, and the opportunity did not occur. Nor did the necessity seem very urgent, as Hermine had not spoken again of going to the theatre. She still felt unwell, and the doctor's visits were more frequent than formerly.
"Have you told your wife yet who the Bellini is?" he asked me one day.
"Not yet."
"She knows it."
"Impossible!"
"She knows it; I give you my word upon that."
"Has she said so to you?"
"No."
"How then----?"
"How then? A physician, my dear fellow, has sharp ears, and a physician who is the friend of the family, as he should always be, has them doubly sharp. He hears between the words that are spoken; and I can only repeat to you that I have heard between the words of your wife, and learned that she knows the Bellini to be Constance von Zehren, and that she knows more beside. Whether she knows all, and whether she knows the real truth, is only known to the person that told her."
"And that is----?"
"Our common friend Arthur."
"Arthur has not been in the city for eight weeks."
"Our postal system forwards with admirable fidelity all letters intrusted to it, even anonymous ones."
"But good heaven, doctor, what interest could Arthur have----?"
"Revenge is sweet," said the doctor.
"In this case it would be stupid too, for----"
"It is often stupid too."
"For the steuerrath lives almost exclusively upon my father-in-law's purse, and I bought a considerable place for Arthur only yesterday, and upon the table there lies a letter in which he asks me again for a large loan of money."
"All that makes no difference. And my dear George, don't take to moping. You are a man, and there is no occasion here for despair. We must not take things harder than they are; the really hard ones cannot be made any lighter so, and with this latter article I should think you were already sufficiently supplied."