Part 34

“I cannot get married, Eberhard,” she said, “really, I cannot. I did not entice you to me; you dare not reproach me. I have tried to make my attitude toward you perfectly clear from the very first time I met you. I cannot get married; I cannot.”

For five or six minutes there was a silence that was interrupted only by human voices in the distance and the sound of carriages from the streets down in the city. In the compassion that Eleanore after all felt for Eberhard she sensed the harshness of her unqualified refusal. She looked at him courageously, firmly, and said: “It is not obstinacy on my part, Eberhard; nor is it stupid anxiety, nor imagination, nor lack of respect. Truth to tell I have a very high opinion of you. But there must be something quite unnatural about me, for you see that I loathe the very idea of getting married. I detest the thought of living with a man. I like you, but when you touch me as you did a little while ago when you kissed my hand, a shudder runs through my whole body.”

Eberhard looked at her in astonishment; he was morose, too.

She continued: “It has been in me since my childhood; perhaps I was born with it, just as other people are born with a physical defect. It may be that I have been this way ever since a certain day in my life. It was an autumn evening in Pappenheim, where my aunt then lived. My sister Gertrude and I were walking in a great fruit garden; we came to a thorn hedge, and sitting by the hedge was an old woman. My father and mother were far away, and the old woman said to my sister, then about seven: Be on your guard against everything that sings and rings. To me she said: Be careful never to have a child. The next day the woman was found dead under the hedge. She was over ninety years old, and for more than fifty years she had peddled herbs in Altmühltal. I naturally had not the vaguest idea what she meant at the time by ‘having a child,’ but her remark stuck in my heart like an arrow. It grew up with me; it became a part of me. And when I learned what it meant, it was a picture by the side of the picture of death. Now you must not think that I have gone through life thus far filled with a feeling of despicable fear. Not at all. I simply have no desires. The idea does not attract me. If it ever does, many questions will I ask about life and death! I will laugh at the old woman under the hedge and do what I must.”

As she spoke these last words, her face took on a strangely chaste and fanciful expression. Eberhard could not take his eyes from her. “Ah, there are after all fairy creatures on this flat, stale, and unprofitable earth,” he thought, “enchanted princesses, mysterious Melusinas.” He smiled somewhat distrustfully—as a matter of habit. But from this moment his frank, open, wooing attachment to the girl was transformed into a consuming passion.

He was proud, and man enough to subdue his feelings. But he yearned more than ever, and was tortured by his yearnings to know something more than the vague knowledge he had at present about that glass case, that spirit-chest in which, so near and yet so far, this lovely creature lived, impervious to the touch of mortal hands and immune to the flames of love.

“You are rejecting me, then?” he asked.

“Well, it is at least advisable that for the time being we avoid each other’s presence.”

“Advisable for me, you think. And for the time being? How am I to interpret that?”

“Well, let us say for five years.”

“Why exactly five years? Why not twenty? Why not fifty? It would be all the same.”

“It seems to me that five years is just the right amount of time, Eberhard.”

“Five years! Each year has twelve times thirty, fifty-two times seven days. Why, the arithmetic of it is enough to make a man lose his mind.”

“But it must be five years,” said Eleanore gently though firmly. “In five years I will not have changed. And if I am just the same in five years from now, why, we’ll talk it over again. I must not exclude myself from the world forever. My father often says: What looks like fate at Easter is a mere whim by Pentecost. I prefer to wait until Pentecost and not to forget my friend in the meantime.”

She gave him her hand with a smile.

He shook his head: “No, I can’t take your hand; another one of those shudders will run through you if I do. Farewell, Eleanore.”

“And you too, Eberhard, farewell!”

Eberhard started down the hill. Suddenly he stopped, turned around, and said: “Just one thing more. That musician—Nothafft is his name, isn’t it?—is engaged to your sister, isn’t he?”

“Yes, Gertrude and Daniel will get married some day. But who told you about it?”

“The musician himself was in a restaurant. The fellows were drinking, and he was so incautious as to raise his glass, and, somewhat after the fashion of an intoxicated drum-major, he himself drank to Gertrude’s health. For some time there was talk of his marrying you. It is much better as it is. I can’t stand artists. I can’t even have due respect for them, these indiscreet hotspurs. Good night, Eleanore.”

And with that he vanished in the darkness.

IN MEMORY OF A DREAM FIGURE

One evening Daniel called on Benda to take leave of him for a long while.

Just as he was about to enter the front gate, he saw Herr Carovius’s dog standing there showing his teeth. The beast’s bloodshot eyes were fixed on a ten-year old girl who was likewise on the point of entering the house, but, afraid of the dog, she did not dare take another step. The animal had dragged his chain along behind him, and stood there now, snarling in a most vicious way.

Daniel took the child by the hand and led it back a few steps, after he had frightened the dog into silence by some rough commands. “Who are you?” he asked the girl.

“Dorothea Döderlein,” was the reply.

“Ah,” said Daniel. He could not help but laugh, for there was a comic tone of precociousness in the girl’s manner of speaking. But she was a very pretty child. A sly, smiling little face peeped out from under her hood, and her velvet mantle with great pearl buttons enshrouded a dainty figure.

“You should have been in bed long ago, Dorothea,” said Daniel. “What will the night watchman think when he comes along and finds you up? He will take you by the collar, and lead you off to jail.”