What was I to answer? I should have given much to be able to tell her what it meant; but I could not, for it meant precisely nothing.
Ah, well, that was many years ago. I now smoke other cigars, which I buy in another shop, and I no longer wonder about the meaning of life—but that is not because I think I have found it.
THE WAGES OF SIN
THIS is the story of a young girl and an apothecary with a white vest.
She was young and slim, she smelled of pine woods and heather, and her complexion was sunburned and a trifle freckled. So she was when I knew her. But the apothecary was a quite ordinary apothecary; he wore a white vest on Sundays, and on a Sunday this attracted attention. It attracted attention in a place in the country so far away from the world that no one in that region was so sophisticated as to wear a white vest on Sundays except the apothecary.
This, you see, was how it happened that one Sunday morning there was a knock at my door, and when I opened it, the apothecary stood outside in his white vest and bowed several times. He was very polite and very much embarrassed.
“I beg your most humble pardon,” he said, “but Miss Erika was here yesterday with her sisters while you were away, and when she went, she left her poetry book for you and me to write something in it. Here it is. But I don’t know at all what to write. Could you perhaps kindly——?” And he bowed again several times.
“We will think the matter over,” I answered in a friendly tone.
I took the book therefore and for my own share inscribed a translation of “Du bist wie eine Blume,” which I had made myself and which I always use for that purpose. I then began to search among my papers to see if by any chance I had some old verses from my school days which would suit for the apothecary. Finally I came upon the following bad poem:
You set my thoughts in turmoil,
I wither in longing’s blight.
In solitude you haunt me,
I dreamed of you in the night.