Still not a word from Albert. Only hot tears burned his tender eyelids.
Suddenly, without a word, he flung his arms around his mother and kissed her tear-stained cheeks. Indeed, henceforth he would apply himself to mathematics and would study hard, day and night.
But before long he had again fallen from grace, despite his steadfast efforts to please his mother. This realization did not dawn upon him until toward the close of the following term. With a heart filled with contrition he reviewed the past. Alas! he had spent most of his time on poetry and novels and mythology but had scarcely given more than fleeting glances to his other studies.
Conscious of guilt he sought to justify himself to himself. With such an indulgent audience he had no difficulty in purging himself of all wrong. What difference did it really make to him whether a plus b equaled x or sixteen? What was it to him that the sum of the interior angles of a polygon equaled two right angles, taken as many times, less two, as the figures had sides? Of what concern to him was the expedition of Cyrus the Younger against his brother Artaxerxes thousands of years ago when a greater expedition of a greater hero had so recently ended disastrously! Why tax his brain with the Greek aorist and the Latin grammar and the stilted speeches of Clearches? Ah, if he could only become a great man without being compelled to learn these things!
But his mother had impressed upon him again and again that the road to greatness lay through a labyrinth of angles and equations and logarithms, with impediments consisting of irregular verbs of decayed Romans, of dead Greeks, and of Hebrews who would not die!
III.
Sex, however, had not yet played a definite part in his existence. Once when declaiming “Der Taucher” at a school celebration his roving eye caught sight of the pretty daughter of a well known official in the audience and he was so affected by her beauty that speech left him. The teacher, back on the speaker’s platform, endeavored to prompt him, thinking he had forgotten the lines, but to no purpose. Albert’s eyes were riveted upon that beautiful vision and he could not proceed. Now and then he had received other jolts of passion—the convulsive jolts of adolescence—but he had brooded over them for short periods, cherished them for a while, and finally dismissed them from his mind.
Thus several years had passed full of intermittent flitting fancies, emotions that were meaningless to him.
One day a sudden change took place in him. Something had happened that was fixed in his mind. He was conscious of sentiments and feelings that were of the same nature that he had experienced before and yet were different. Prior to this he could not define the strange longings of his being, now they spoke to him in unmistakable terms; the voice was tumultuous; he could not shut it out.
He was passing the Witch’s hut, which stood at the end of the town, close by the Rhine. No one called her by her real name, Graettel, but only by the name of the Witch. She gave potions to lovelorn maidens and exorcised evil spirits from unclean bodies.