"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."