“Even the possibility is terrible to me. If it were a certainty, Frederick, I should not be crying so softly and quietly on your shoulder. I should have to shriek and wail out loud. But the possibility, nay, the probability, that in the year which is opening you may be torn from my arms by a marching order. That is quite enough to transport me with anxiety and grief.”
“Bethink you, Martha. You are yourself going to meet a peril, as this Christmas box of yours so charmingly informed me, and yet we two do not think of the cruel possibility which threatens every woman in childbed about as much as every man on the battlefield. Let us enjoy our life, and not think of the death which is impending over the heads of all of us.”
“You are talking just like Aunt Mary, dearest, as if our lot depended on ‘Providence,’ and not on the thoughtlessness, cruelty, excesses, and follies of our fellow-men. Wherein lies the inevitable necessity of this war with Denmark?”
“It has not yet broken out, and there may still——”
“I know, I know; accidents may still happen to avert the evil. But it is not accident, not political intrigues and humours which ought to decide such questions of destiny; but the firm, righteous will of mankind. But what is the good of my ‘ought’ or ‘ought not’? I cannot alter the order of things. I can only complain of it. But do help me so far, Frederick! Do not try to console me with hollow conventional evasions! You do not believe in them yourself! You yourself are shuddering with noble repugnance! The only consolation I find is in thinking that you condemn and bewail as I do what will make me and numberless others so unhappy.”
“Yes, my dear; if this fatality should come to pass, then I will say you are right. Then I will not hide from you the shuddering and the hate which the national slaughter ordained on us awakes in me. But to-day let us still enjoy our life. We surely have each other—nothing separates us. There is not the slightest bar between our souls! Let us enjoy this happiness as long as we have it; enjoy it to the full. Let us not think of the threatened destruction of it. No joy assuredly can last for ever. In a hundred years it will be all the same whether our life has been long or short. The number of beautiful days is not the question, but the degree of their beauty. Let the future bring what it pleases, my dearly-loved wife; our present is so beautiful, so very beautiful, that I cannot now feel anything but a blessed delight.”
As he said this, he threw his arm around me, and kissed my head, which rested on his breast. And then the threatening future disappeared for me also, and I too let myself sink into the sweet transport of the moment.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
On 10th January we returned to Olmütz.
No one any longer doubted about the outbreak of war. I had heard a few individuals in Vienna hope that the Schleswig-Holstein dispute could even yet be capable of diplomatic settlement; but in the military circles of our garrison town all possibility of peace was held to be out of the question. Among the officers and their wives there prevailed an excited, but on the whole joyfully excited, temper. Opportunities for distinction and advancement were in prospect, for the satisfaction of the love of adventure in one, the ambition of another, the thirst for promotion of a third.