And now Beate Rauchfuss, as an old woman, sat at the end of an afternoon in her garden on the Ettersberg. All was over that she had once known--joys, longings, hopes, desires, and powers; and Herr Kosch was gone too. She, that loved most deeply, had the most to bear--for she bore him the rest of his life. His sufferings were her sufferings, the movements of his life also the movements of hers. So she led woman's burdensome double existence--the burdensome manifold existence which is woman's.
With her children she shared the bliss of youth and the sorrows of youth, felt with them their disappointments and their joys. With two of her dear ones she had looked into the face of death; she had climbed Herr Kosch's steep path with him, without his calling her to follow. She had stolen out after him, learned to keep step with him as an unnoticed companion of the way. And when he, weary of wandering, found his faithful helper and comrade by his side, she had reached the goal of her life.
Yes, women learn to think in a different way from men. She came to understand her old friend's saying. As she gave birth to children, so she gave birth to thoughts. Each was a hard-won conquest from the heart of things, not found by chance, not learned, not strange and separate--but born alive of herself and paid for with suffering.
When she sat, an old woman, in the rays of the setting sun, full of peace, her soul was round as it had been in her first youth, with no projections, no fissures, on which cares could hang themselves or into which they could creep. Like a distant noise and bustle sounded the world's business in the undisturbed peace. For the second time in her life, her soul was like a sunlit ball of crystal; it had been so in her youth, when no stain or shadow had yet fallen upon it from life, and now, when all the stains and shadows were purged away from it.
Whether life was easy or hard, marriage happy or unhappy, work successful or unsuccessful, it was all one--a matter of indifference. Only one thing was not a matter of indifference: that the old woman sat here now in the evening sunshine with a soul that was rounded and transparent, floating in space like a clear shining sphere, dreaming peacefully and asking nothing--done with the world.
CLARA VIEBIG
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[BURNING LOVE] (1902)
TRANSLATED BY WILLIAM GUILD HOWARD, A.M.
Assistant Professor of German, Harvard University
There were fires in the village. It was always at night that they broke out, now here, now there; and this had been going on for eight weeks. The corn in the fields had just come to the full ear when on a dark evening the first blaze was discovered. Since that time the fearful guest had visited no less than ten cottages.