Kleophea had carried the idea of flight about with her for long, miserable weeks; she had sought in vain to fight against it, it returned again and again and the chains that bound the unhappy woman to that man became more and more unendurable. The day came on which Dr. Théophile of Kröppel Street raised his hand against his wife and struck her; the following night Kleophea fled and hid herself in Henriette's attic room till the preparations for the distant journey were completed.
"They probably did not look for me anywhere except in the morgue," said Moses Freudenstein's wife in the vicarage in Grunzenow.
From Paris to Havre de Grâce, then the sea, the ship, the journey! Everything was indefinite, blurred, intangible and incomprehensible!
"Les côtes de l'Allemagne!"
The shout pierced Kleophea to the marrow. Poor, homeless, wandering soul! Oh, to lie still in the grave, there, where the dark, hazy strip, the German coast, lies on the horizon. It is as if she had once heard a song of firm, green ground, green trees, of a quiet, peaceful churchyard among the green, and could not remember it exactly and yet was obliged to keep on trying to find it again. The ship went its way, groaning and panting; again the evening came and the coast of her native country disappeared in the dusk;—she has not yet found the sad old song and the ship groaned and panted all night long and on into the next day, the gray, hazy day.
Kleophea leant immovable against the rail of the ship and looked into the haze above the water and sought to remember the old song. She had been told that the German coast was quite near again and that without the fog they would long since have seen it.
Henriette Trublet told how a quarter of an hour before the fire broke out she had found Kleophea leaning against the side of the ship, unconscious, and that during all the horrors that followed she remained in the same condition. She was not awake until she had reached the vicarage in Grunzenow and lay in Fränzchen's arms!...
How the waves roll up toward the vicarage that looks out from its hill on the expanse of the Baltic! The waves of the sea do not reach the poor little building; neither can they do it any harm however fierce they may at times appear. They may swallow up islands, villages, towns, light-houses, churches and churchyards. They may wash out the mouldering coffins of long-buried generations and throw them before the feet of the shuddering present, wound about with sea-weed, covered with slime. The waves of the great sea can be wrathful, very wrathful; but the little house on the hill where stands the church of the poor village of Grunzenow is secure, it stands on safe ground and whoever takes refuge beneath its low roof is well protected. But best protected of all was Kleophea's poor, erring heart; it, above all, might rest.