Through Night to Light: A Novel

by Friedrich Spielhagen

But even his love for Helen was but a faint reflex of that heavenly, pure flame which had lighted up his heart like the moon in a dark night during the time of his love for Melitta. There was in this love much of that weird, consuming fire of an eager devouring passion which knows no holy reverence for its idol.

To all this must be added, that he felt indescribably unhappy in his position. His duties at the college were repugnant to him, when he had hardly begun them. The virtues required by the exceedingly difficult vocation of a teacher: industry, perseverance, patience, self-denial, he had practised little in his life. The close air of the class-room, and the noise of a crowd of merry boys were a torment for his over-wrought nerves. And then his colleagues! this Rector Clemens, overflowing with a false humanity; this stiff, wooden Professor Snellius; this Doctor Kubel, combining easy comfort with so-called wit; these lions of learning, Winimer and Broadfoot. Gulliver meeting, on his famous travels, with the man-like, and therefore awfully hideous Yahoos, could not feel a greater aversion for them than Oswald did for those people with whom his position brought him in daily contact. And these Yahoos were exceedingly obliging and familiar; they seemed to have no suspicion of their ugliness; they overwhelmed the new comer with all possible kindnesses; they invited him again and again to evenings at whist, and evenings at tenpins, æsthetic teas, and dramatic readings! They did not seem to mind at all his reserve, his chilling coldness; on the contrary, they saw in it the awkwardness of a young man who has not moved much in good company, and must be encouraged. Even the ladies seemed to be full of this notion, especially Mrs. Rector Clemens, who declared openly her intention to take the shy young man, who was standing so sadly alone in the world, under her wings, and who had already begun to carry out her threat. "I like you, dear Stein!" said the energetic lady; "you have conquered my heart, and gained by your reading of the 'Captain' a place in our dramatic club. I consider it my duty to polish the younger colleagues. True humanity can only be acquired in intercourse with refined ladies. For what says the poet: 'If you wish to know what is becoming, ask noble ladies!' Look at our colleague, Winimer! You have no idea what a bashful, awkward man he was two years ago when he first came here, and what a charming young man I have made of him! Well, with help from above, I shall probably do as well with you."

Oswald overlooked, of course, the natural bonhommie which prompted this and similar little speeches, and only saw the ridiculous form, at which he laughed mercilessly with Timm, whose company he sought regularly after these inflictions.

But there was in Grunwald, besides the fair manager of the dramatic club, yet another lady who thought she had an older and better right to humanize the young scapegrace, and who was the less willing to yield her part to a rival, as she had elsewhere also been mortally offended by her in her most sacred feelings.

This lady was the authoress of the "Cornflowers."

Primula still trembled whenever she thought of the terrible evening on which she had been expected to become the murderer of a great general and hero, and her only consolation was that so far from reading the part allotted her she had scarcely commenced it. But, however that might be, her hatred and her contempt for the people who had treated her with such indignity remained the same. She declared that an unexpected meeting with Mrs. Rector Clemens might have the most disastrous consequences for her health. She carried, even at first, the precaution so far that she never went out without sending her husband some twenty or thirty yards ahead, so that he could warn her in time of the probable approach of the "Gorgon's head;" and although this extreme nervousness gradually subsided, the mere mention of her adversary's name continued still to cause her immediately great and painful emotion.

But Primula's enterprising spirit did not rest long content with such an apparently passive resistance. Her adversary, and not she alone, but her whole kin and her whole circle, must not merely be despised in silence; they must be positively humiliated. She must be cut to the heart, or, as the poetess called it in Maenadic passionateness, "the flaming firebrand must be hurled upon her own hearth." This, however, could be done in no other way than by exploding the dramatic club by establishing another club in opposition, which should contain, under Primula's direction, all the intelligence of Grunwald, and eclipse the club of the schoolmasters as completely as the moon eclipses a fixed star of first magnitude. To preside over such a club at Grunwald had long been Primula's favorite dream when she was still wandering in the evening twilight by the side of the Fragmentist through the fields of Fashwitz, winding a wreath of blue cyanes for herself in sweet anticipation of the triumphs which she was to celebrate hereafter. She had thought this dream near its fulfilment when she crossed the threshold of the reception rooms in Rector Clemens's house, her Wallenstein in her hand, and the part of Thekla word by word in her head. She had expected that evening to be the hour of her triumph. Was it not to be foreseen--or, more correctly speaking, was it not a matter of course--that as soon as she, Primula, had read the first lines, an immense storm of applause would break out; that the men would beat upon their shields (or books), and men and women would exclaim as with one accord:

"Hail, thrice hail, to the proud light
That makes our darkness bright!
Oh, poetess of lofty mien,
Be thou hereafter our queen!
Oh, don't deny this prayer of ours,
Great author of 'Cornflowers!'"

For this was the Pæan which the authoress had herself composed for the occasion.

Now she saw clearly that she had chosen the wrong road. The scales had fallen from her eyes. What had she, the thoughtful weaver of cornflower-wreaths, to do with the conflict of tragic passions; she, the poetess of the famous Ode to the Mole that she found dead by the wayside, and to the May-bug that lay on its back, in a dramatic club? A lyric club it ought to be; and to establish such a lyric club in open and explicit opposition to the dramatic club at Rector Clemens's house was the thought which, as the poetess sang in her own words, "was rushing through her soul like a mighty tempest in spring, calling forth a thousand germs irresistibly, and yet overthrowing everything in its path." Who could resist such inspiration?