Whatever the town, we were floating straight toward it. I suddenly thought of my dream long ago, and told it to him, adding:
“I think this must have been the floating wreck to which you and I seemed clinging; though I thought that all of the dream that was going to be fulfilled had already come to pass on that Carnival Monday afternoon.”
The boat had got into one of the twisting currents, and was being propelled directly toward the town.
Eugen looked at me and laughed. I asked why.
“What for a lark! as they say in your country.”
“You are quite mistaken. I never heard such an expression. But what is such a lark?”
“We have no hats; we want something to eat; we must have tickets to get back to Elberthal, and I have just two thalers in my pocket—oh! and a two-pfennige piece. I left my little all behind me.”
“Hurrah! At last you will be compelled to take back that three thalers ten.”
We both laughed at this jeu d’esprit as if it had been something exquisitely witty; and I forgot my disheveled condition in watching the sun rise over the broad river, in feeling our noiseless progression over it, and, above all, in the divine sense of oneness and harmony with him at my side—a feeling which I can hardly describe, utterly without the passionate fitfulness of the orthodox lover’s rapture, but as if for a long time I had been waiting for some quality to make me complete, and had quietly waked to find it there, and the world understandable—life’s riddle read.
Eugen’s caresses were few, his words of endearment quiet; but I knew what they stood for; a love rooted in feelings deeper than those of sense, holier than mere earthly love—feelings which had taken root in adversity, had grown in darkness and “made a sunshine in a shady place”—feelings which in him had their full and noble growth and beauty of development, but which it seems to be the aim of the fashionable education of this period as much as possible to do away with—the feeling of chivalry, delicacy, reticence, manliness, modesty.