She sat there for some time, thinking of no definite person and conscious of no definite trouble; she merely felt sad, in a certain sense platonically sad. Her thoughts were without clear outlines: all that she had experienced—and missed—that day flowed into a hazy picture. Her eyes closed and gradually she began to doze: her indefinite thoughts were confused into a still more indefinite dream.
Again it seemed to be clear day around her. The call of the toad and the rustling of the leaves had ceased. In place of them there seemed to be the light, murmuring plash of the oar. She was sailing in a gondola on the lake and the boatmen were Helmer and Victor Adolph—both in the characteristic garb and attitude of Venetian gondoliers. The slender black boat was surrounded by cloud-borne aviators. Ah, if she could only wing her way up into the upper air in such an airship. The wish was followed—as so often occurs in dreams—by its instantaneous fulfillment. A hovering cloud-car took her up and bore her away. She wanted to call to the gondoliers, but they had vanished together with the gondola. All around her only clouds were to be seen, rushing onward and changing their shapes like locomotive smoke which one sees streaming by the train windows. Soon her equipage rose above this region of clouds and the sky grew blue over her head. In easy motion it went up—up and down in rhythmical regularity like a swing, but like a swing which at every gyration lifts farther from the earth; then another forward plunge in speediest flight—like a sailboat driven before a wild wind;—nothing more was to be seen of the earth. On the zenith a dazzling orb—is that the sun? How, then, can her eyes endure its brightness? The orb grew ever larger; it was coming nearer ... for Heaven’s sake, how high was she doomed to mount?
A sense of terror darted through Franka’s limbs.... “Enough! Enough!” she cried and looked everywhere in her vehicle.... Where then is the helmsman? No one! she was all alone. “Alone”—that was the anguishing word which just before had been oppressing her heart; but now for the first time she understood it in its most gruesome sense: alone in the universe! What in comparison was all earthly solitude? Ever higher she arose toward the sun-resembling orb; ever wilder became the storm wind ... whither, whither, into what boundlessness filled with horrors? A paroxysm of anguish and terror contracted her heart. Then she felt a strong arm flung protectingly around her; one of the gondoliers stood at her side. She could not see his face; only that strong, rescuing arm with its warm clasp filled her dreamy consciousness with a hitherto unknown joy of security. The little airship now glided gently downwards. It was a blissful feeling: the antithesis of loneliness, a lovely sense of safety; a tide of tenderness billowed, literally billowed, around her, for it was to her as if great warm drops fell on her forehead and trickled caressingly over her body. If one might imagine a paroxysm of appeasing—this miracle she experienced in her dream.
But even in a dream the extreme of happiness lasts only a second. The equipage had become entangled in a knot of other airships which precipitated themselves on one another—painfully their fragments fell into her face; a booming salvo of artillery tore the air, and Franka, awakening, found herself sitting on her balcony in a heavy shower of hail, and the storm, which had broken, was raging with lightning and loud peals of thunder. She jumped up to run into her room and at that instant she felt that the bar of the blind, loosened by the wind, had fallen on her chair, and slipped down to her side.
Just then Frau Rockhaus appeared at the balcony door. “Why! Are you here? I should not have thought of looking for you here. How do you happen to be out in all this storm? It has been raining for a long time, and now it is hailing and thundering. You are wet through.”
“Yes, dear Eleonore; I merely fell sound asleep.”
“Who ever heard of such a thing! Now, get to bed as quickly as you can.”
“Yes, I will. Please ring for the maid, and goodnight.”
As soon as her light was put out and she had composed herself for going to sleep, a vivid recollection of her dream came to her. Again she believed that she felt the strong arm at her side,—it must have been the bar,—and she tried to conjure back that peculiar consciousness of security which, after the terror of the blood-curdling plunge into endless space, had so deeply inspired her.... She succeeded in doing so: she could bring back almost the whole dream with all its details, and she felt enriched by a new experience. Can it be, then, that such a heavenly refuge, such a paradise of security can be found?
It was long before she went to sleep again; indeed, she did not care to sleep, for the sweet recollection of the dream, like a slight intoxication of opium, was more refreshing, more tranquilizing than any sleep. Only toward dawn did she fall into a deep, sound slumber.