We will stop here a moment. What drove Poldl so to the priestly calling, what made him so intent upon it? We might mention in passing the vanity and the high sense of importance, which is created by the desire in the sixteen year old boy after the most reverend calling. Yet, though I would in no way undervalue his ambition or the satisfaction of a so pleasantly tickled vanity, yet decisive and determining these can scarcely be. Strong motives must govern in order to explain more completely such an impulsion. When Poldl strode over the fields and began to preach, “At that time the Lord Jesus spoke to the disciples …,” then he was indeed not far from conceiving himself as the Holy One and his mother as the Virgin Mary. Jesus had offered himself for the sins of man, as he now for the sin of his mother. According to this it is nothing else than his love to the mother which drives him to the sacred office, in which it is not to be forgotten that such a love, which leads to a thought obsession, is in the light of experience never without the erotic.
This mingling of sensuality and love to the mother, and to an older woman who could be his mother, shows itself still more clearly two years later, when he has a holiday from the seminary for a few days. He finds at home a buxom picture of a woman, a relative on a visit, almost twice as old as he, the very essence of cheeriness and health. “The boy clung closest to her. In spite of his eighteen years he still seemed childish enough and this he turned to account, and ‘played the calf with her,’” to use the excellent word of the writer.
Six years later Poldl was appointed to assist an invalid vicar, in whose home a regular vicar's cook kept house with her sixteen year old girl, whom she had from the old vicar. In the same year Poldl's mother was laid to rest and her son appeared at her funeral, where the robust peasant girls and maidens pressed themselves upon him. But he “withdrew shyly from every one of them and gave his hand to no one, as he obligingly might have done. He has always before this appeared like milk and blood,” thought Martin, the anxious one, “now he has an unhealthy look, no color, sunken cheeks, and his eyes are deep within, he stares at the ground and cannot bear to have a stranger look at him. It does not please me.”
All this is clear and transparent to the physician. In the young man now twenty-four years old the inherited blood began to make itself felt, and at the same time the cook and her daughter let no stimulus be wanting. He suffered under his self restraint, grew pale and hollow and because only his actions remained chaste but not his thought, he could no more look freely upon a woman. When he now preached in the pulpit, he spoke of the devil as the tempter and of all his evil suggestions. He could declare what evil thoughts come to a man and in closing he threatened his flock most earnestly that the devil would carry them all away together. We know well that no sins are more condemned than those which one holds himself capable of committing or which one would himself most gladly commit if only one dared.
The young priest owed it to a great love which he felt for the miller's daughter that he kept himself pure at least in body. So much the more was the vicar's cook intent upon bringing about his downfall through her girl. Then they could again rule at the vicarage, since the old vicar's days were numbered, when Poldl came into the fat living left vacant. It was at the burial of the old priest that Poldl delivered at the grave the funeral oration for the dead, and endeavored to lay the good example which the old man had given upon the hearts of his flock. As he lifted his eyes once and caught those of the miller's Marie-Liese, who was listening so devoutly, not taking her eyes from him, he suddenly remained stuck in the midst of his speech and could find his place in the text again only with difficulty. Was he not able to maintain before her pure glance the fiction of a noble priest, did it come to his consciousness that he was wandering in the same paths on which the other had been most severely wounded? Something of this the miller's daughter seems to have had in mind, for as she later begged his pardon for having confused him by staring at him, at the same time she advised him not to have anything to do with those at the vicarage. The vicar's daughter, who had stolen up unobserved, shook her fist at them both, while her mother drew Poldl later into a corner to give vent to her feelings, “You cannot have the miller's daughter and do not for a moment believe that she would be willing to have you.”
On his death bed in the lesser parish, which he held later, he complained to Martin, “I should never have been a priest”—with his inherited passionate blood, in spite of his mother's urging and his love to her. “Martin, you have no idea how hard it is to run caught in a sack; it costs a deal of trouble to keep oneself upright. If one does not twist about one falls into it. The cowl was such a sack for me.… Brother, I have unwittingly fallen into disgrace as a wild beast into a trap, and I am more ashamed of it perhaps than the worst sinner of that which he has done deliberately and maliciously. I would not have stayed in the trap, could everything at first only have remained secret, so that no one would have been afraid to extend a clean hand to me, by which I might have found myself and might again belong to the world and everything. But that the others knew right well and they wanted me for themselves and therefore they have behaved without fear or shame so that soon everything was free and open to all Rodenstein from the forest house at one end to the mill at the other. From that time on I have seen no friendly eye, and the blue, yes, the blue eyes (of the miller's daughter) were always turned defiantly away from me. And because she was unkind to me she became all at once kind to some one whom she formerly could not bear. The folk shook their heads and prophesied little good for her. So the time came when I must come here to this parish. There lay upon me what can soon crush one to the ground, for peace and honor were squandered and those who had won them from me hung like chains upon me and the bit of sunshine that I had had in life I had to leave behind in Rodenstein. When however there was added to this concern for her to whom I owed the bit of happiness, I broke under it and then they took me and brought me here and I let myself be brought.”
So had he truly become a child of sin with the feeling of lost purity and a great consciousness of guilt upon his soul. And that he had not merely squandered his own honor and peace but had also dragged the beloved to harm, so that she must have doubts of her purity, this does the rest for him and makes him the willing play ball of the parish folk. From the first day when he took over his new charge, he began to wander in the full moonlight up to the ghostly hour of midnight. At the stroke of twelve he went to the pulpit, over which a bright moonbeam lay, which also lighted up his face as bright as day. With closed eyes he knelt in the pulpit, “his folded hands before him on the upholstered border, the head bowed upon it as if in quiet prayer to collect himself as usual before the sermon. All at once he raised himself, bent forward a little as if the pews were full of people and he wished first to look them over, then he threw his arms to either side and stood there like one who would say, ‘Strike me dead, if I have offended you, but I cannot do otherwise!’ He did not say this but in a voice as of one speaking in a dream he uttered the words, ‘I know of nothing!’ And then once more—his hands extended toward heaven and spread open, as if he would show everything to all within or about the church—‘I know of nothing!’ Afterward he turned and went.”
In this classic picture of the brother are some features of a new sort. Above all, sexuality appears only incidentally to play a part, in so far as it awakens the latent tendency to moon walking. Poldl begins to wander at midnight after the miller's daughter is lost to him and he is tortured by anxiety for her future. Otherwise he does what so frequently is done by the moon walker, he carries out the apparently harmless activity of the day as he prays in the church before an imaginary audience. At least he truly imitates the formalities with which prayer begins, though the conclusion does not accord with the beginning. It sounds like a justification before the folk of Rodenstein, who have taken offence at his action, that he stands there in Luther's place as one who cannot do otherwise though one strike him dead. At the same time the repeated outcry at the end, “I know of nothing, I know of nothing!” smacks not only of a denial that he did not know perhaps why Marie had fallen into distress, but suggests the directly infantile. Thus a child insists, when it is reproached, that it has done nothing.
Let us take up again the threads of our narrative. Poldl faded day by day under the pressure of his heavy burden of soul. At last there remained nothing else for him but to let them write to his brother that he lay sick and wished to see him. As Martin entered the sickroom Poldl stretched his lean arms toward him, breathed a heartfelt cry and began to weep aloud like a child. “You are like a father to me, Martin, you are like a father to me!” And from time to time he added, “Forgive me!” Then he stroked Martin's rough hands, “the hands which had toiled for his daily bread when he was a boy.” And now he poured forth his confession. He should not have become a priest, then the people of the parish would have remained strangers to him and he perhaps would have succeeded to the Rodenstein mill. His entire concern centered itself about this, that he had not only lost Marie-Liese but was also to blame for the overthrow of her happiness. He related to his brother how the parish folk had apprehended him, so that he was covered with shame, how they all hung about the great bell of Rodenstein until finally the miller's daughter turned from him and to another. After the confession was made Poldl fell asleep contentedly, yet only to wander that very midnight. The invalid was very ill, when Martin talked with him again the next day. And suddenly he began to speak of the days of his childhood and it was remarkable to the brother “how he had remembered the most trivial thing in regard to it and it seemed to me as if he himself often wondered at it in the midst of his speech. Bit by bit thus he took up his life and we talked together of the time when he ran about the sitting-room and the court in his little child's frock, until the time when he went to school, to the seminary, to Rodenstein.… The sun had set when with our prattle we had come to the place where we were, at Weissenhofen. ‘That's the end,’ I said, ‘and there remains nothing else to tell.’—‘Yes, yes,’ said my brother reflectively, ‘that's the end, and there remains nothing more to tell.’” Soon he noticed how truly Martin had spoken in every respect, for the end had come for him now physically. With a blessing on his lips for the newly won brother of his heart, he laid himself down to sleep. “It had become still as a mouse in the room. After perhaps a quarter of an hour I heard him say, ‘Yes, yes, were we now together, only you must not hold me so tightly to your breast.’ With this he threw himself suddenly over to the right, drew a deep breath, and it was over.”
Let us consider once more the circumstances of the moon walking which accompanied this. He begins with this after his removal from Rodenstein and from his heart's beloved. There had preceded the grief over his wasted honor and his forfeited peace, the pain at the loss of the miller's daughter and, which is rather conclusive, the torturing regard for her future, which completely paralyzed his will power. The latter point is somewhat remarkable. For at bottom it was never said that her marriage was unhappy. The people had shaken their heads before it, only, and prophesied nothing good. When Martin fourteen years after the death of his brother meets Marie-Liese at his grave, she has become a handsome woman and has been a widow for eight years but is well poised mentally and lives for her boy. In Poldl's concern the wish must indeed have been father of the thought. If he could not have his treasure, then she should not be happy at the side of another man. Yet apparently this does not refer alone to the miller's daughter. Psychoanalytic experience teaches that where the reaction manifests itself all too strongly this happens because it is not merely a reaction to a present, but above all to a long past experience, which stands behind the other and offers first the original actual tonal background. Only apparently is the effect too strong, if we measure it merely by the actual cause, in truth however the action corresponds to all the causes, that is the new added to the old.