now capture the world’s in defeat.’
“You have conquered but only the bodies,
and the spirit is more than the flesh;
now weave for the soul and where God is
deep in the heart the mesh.”
“You are all mad together,” cried the girls. “This means nothing. What is Wotan to us or we to him?” “This is the new world which we are making,” said the young men, and returned to the feet of their teacher.
But there was one girl in the town who would not give up the fight so easily. She was the daughter of the old pastor, and for her fairness and gentleness and soft beauty had been called “Schneevitchen.” Like her father before her, she had steady grey eyes, and like him she knew the old songs of Germany that (some said) were echoes of the song of the Niebelung—gold girls in the river Rhine. She alone could hold her head against the now predominant pair, and she became in consequence the object of their deadly hate. For often, when the young men crowded round her, Frau Todt geborene Krieg would look into the young men’s eyes as into a mirror and say:
“Mirror, mirror on the wall,
am I fairest of them all?”
And she would see in their eyes the shadow of “Schneevitchen.” She and her husband consulted together, and finally they compounded an apple of sweet essences, which she pretended had grown on a tree in the Hesperides, but to her husband she confessed that it was no such thing and that its real name was Discord. This she gave not to Snow-white to eat, but to the young men, and straightway they were poisoned. For they began to have ugly dreams and see swart visions, and always in the dark heart of them was Snow-white, no longer pure, gentle and loving, but the Lorelei drawing into her whirlpool drowning men.