She caught at the promise, and eagerly and anxiously began to explain how his visit was to be managed. Minna should go down to the stream and wait for him by the sandbank, and when he came, unlock the park gate and lead him up to her room by the new turret staircase.
He listened to her instructions half in a dream. He was shaken body and soul more strongly than before by that mysterious sense of intoxication, which was nothing, could be nothing else but the omnipotent desire for death.
And then they separated. She took the path to Uhlenfelde, and he went back to the sleigh.
When he reached the road, he stopped, leaned against a poplar, and looked after her. Her figure was a mere black strip in the midst of the vast white duskiness of the snow fields. It grew smaller and rounder, and finally shrank to a vanishing point. All at once a wave of cruel devouring scorn swept over him. Scorn of himself, scorn of her, scorn of the whole world.
This was the end! This was the end!
He laughed aloud, so fierce and mirthless a laugh, that Johann, who was sitting on his box twenty paces away, started and looked round.
The horses moved forward, the bells rippled through the air.
"What now?" Leo asked himself, and stared absently in the old coachman's face. He had intended to drive to Münsterberg. What did he want in Münsterberg? Ah, to be sure, he had been going to see the old Jew Jacobi in order to raise cash for his voyage to America. But that would not be necessary now. Nevertheless he must kill time somehow till the fatal hour drew near.
To Münsterberg, then. Sleighing was good sport, he said to himself, as he flew through the twilight, and the wind met his face. He tried to recollect what other business he had in Münsterberg. The threshing-machine wanted repairing. Hang the threshing-machine. Then there were debts to pay; paltry little debts; the big ones would have to remain unsettled. He owed a clerk called Danziger fifteen marks. A betting loss. Fritz, the head waiter at the Prussian Crown, had not been paid for the last drinking bout. And then he remembered that the fair-haired Ida had drunk his health in three brandy bitters, and was so far the loser by the transaction.
"Fair Ida isn't a bad sort," he thought "She mustn't suffer through my death."