The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Volume Xix Part 21

"Shall we sleep now?" asked Marion.

"How can you think of it?" replied Billy; "at twelve you must be at the linden. Come sit down beside me." She pulled up a chair for Marion; she herself climbed into bed, but sat up, leaning against the pillows. So the two children sat together; their eyes closed at times and then they slept, but as we doze in the train, constantly starting up again in fear of missing something. In the course of the morning Countess Betty knocked twice at the door, but she was not admitted. "No, no, we are sleeping," was the word. When Lina the chambermaid came, she was given the order for breakfast. "A whole lot," said Billy, "tea and eggs, ham, and bread, and a whole lot, do you hear?" She had a veritable traveler's appet.i.te.

Soon Billy became very restless. She kept asking Marion over and over if it were not time, and it was only eleven o'clock when Marion was compelled to go down to the linden. Billy sat quietly in her bed with burning cheeks and folded hands, intent upon the strange tension of the spirit within her. Yes, it was all there, her powerful desire for Boris, the painful emotion at the thought of him, the courage for all possibilities, and the fear of what now must come. But again and again she felt the strangest alienation from the Billy who was feeling and experiencing all this. The familiar noises of the house reached her; down in the garden the twins were laughing, in the corridor Madame Bonnechose was scolding a maid, and at the open window of the lower story Lohmann was singing a hymn. But the Billy of the unhappy love, who was resolved not to obey her father, who had to decide, she belonged no more to this long-familiar life. But where was Marion?

Billy raised her bare arms high above her head, wrung her hands, and groaned, "Oh dear, why doesn't she come!" At last steps came softly running down the corridor, and Marion appeared, heated and breathless.

The two girls said nothing; Marion mutely handed Billy a letter, sat down, and stared anxiously at her. Billy had become quite calm, and now held the letter in her hand without opening it. "How was it?" she asked.

"There by the linden," reported Marion in a low voice, "a little Jewish boy was standing. He had very large black eyes, two tightly twisted black curls hung down over his ears, and he wore a long coat like a grown man; he brought the letter. It was awfully weird."

"Of course it was weird," remarked Billy, and she leaned back among her pillows and prepared to open and read her letter.

Boris wrote. There was no heading. "Tonight," the letter read, "at about midnight, I shall be down by the linden near the park, waiting.

No one must know. On one side stands everything that you have till now regarded as your life, on the other I stand--decide. If you take me, then come. If you do not come, I shall forgive you and again walk in loneliness my dark road. We shall never meet again. To approach so great a happiness and then be obliged to forsake it again, is fatal."

There was also no signature. Billy dropped the letter; she did not need to decide, she knew that she would go to him. It seemed to her as if she scarcely had a voice in this, for the other, the alien Billy, was acting, and it was she who must go down by night to the lime-tree.

Billy's glance fell upon Marion, whose eyes were fixed on her in boundless expectancy. Billy smiled and shook her head a little and said, "No, I can tell you nothing." Marion did not answer, but her eyes filled with tears. She rose and crept softly out of the room; she was very unhappy. During the whole time she had felt as if Billy's love-affair were hers too; she had shared her love for Boris, the excitements and pains, she had felt herself loved in Billy's person, and now she was suddenly thrust aside and was again simply Marion Bonnechose, who was excluded from all the destinies awaiting countesses.

But activity and life came over Billy. She rang for Lina, asked for her new muslin dress with the pink carnation figure, and called for her coral necklace; and moreover she was friendly and talkative to the chambermaid. Lina had to tell her about the forester to whom she was provisionally engaged.

The day had grown very sultry, and in the west gray-blue clouds were piled up. "We shall have a thunderstorm," said Count Hamilcar, as he stood on the porch steps and sniffed the hot air of the garden.

Countess Betty stood beside him, bending her head to one side and blinking up at the clouds. Over the garden walks Bob and Billy were chasing each other. The count followed them with his eyes, then he turned to his sister: "The emotional crisis seems to be pa.s.sing off nicely," he remarked.

Countess Betty however looked frightened. "Oh dear, Hamilcar, I don't know, this merriment is not natural; I am so afraid for the child.

Madame Bonnechose thinks too ..."

"Do not worry, dear Betty," the count interrupted her, "whatever Madame Bonnechose may think. Young people like to regard love as a force, which is elemental, irrational, but irresistible; very well, then this force must simply be opposed by another force which may also pa.s.s for elemental, for irrational and irresistible. Well, dear Betty, to represent that force is now my role." He smiled his wry, mocking smile, and went into the house to take his afternoon nap.

Billy was tired with running. "Enough," she cried to Bob. She brushed the hair out of her hot face and thought a moment. What should she do now?--for she must do something, something, anything but keep still and look into the darkness that lay beyond this day. When little Miss Demme went past her, she took her arm, saying, "Come, let's eat plums and talk about Mr. Post." But during these afternoon hours, when the sun rested upon the garden like a heavy, golden sleepiness, it was hard for Billy to keep alive the fever that she now required. Finally she went to hunt up Moritz and ask him to take her rowing on the pond in the garden.

"What, you and I?" asked Moritz, somewhat astonished and blus.h.i.+ng.

"You and I, of course," said Billy.

That seemed to be the right thing. Billy found it soothing to stretch out in a half reclining position in the bow of the boat, and have Moritz's heated, peaceful face before her, with the blue eyes that looked at her unswervingly with satisfied devotion. The water was very black; here and there a coating of green plants lay on top of it, which sc.r.a.ped softly along the keel of the boat. How wearily the old willows bent over the water, and a secure, contented uneventfulness dwelt here, an uneventfulness which made Billy weak and cowardly. Why can it not go on so, she thought. As the little crucians lie motionless on the surface of the water in the suns.h.i.+ne, only stirring their fins a little from time to time, just to feel they are alive,--that must feel good.

But suddenly she had a recollection that was like a p.r.i.c.k of conscience. She felt as if she were neglecting or betraying something.

She started up.

"Row to sh.o.r.e," she commanded. Moritz looked up in astonishment. "Yes, yes, to sh.o.r.e," repeated Billy impatiently. And once on sh.o.r.e, when Moritz lifted her out of the boat, Billy felt that she must do something which would contradict the aristocratic calm of this quiet pond, the little crucians, and the old willows, something which would slap it in the face, and she bent forward and kissed Moritz. "But Billy, I don't understand," stammered Moritz, turning a deep red, but Billy had gone.

The evening came, with tea on the porch. As the moon rose late, the garden lay there in profound darkness; the wall of clouds had risen higher in the sky, while the western sky was still covered with stars.

At times the blue gleam of a lightning flash flicked across the garden, and a sudden gust shook at the trees, so that one could hear the fruit falling upon the turf in all directions. On the porch only the red tips of the burning cigars were visible, and the voices of the speakers took on something soft and rea.s.sured, as if they were trying to attune themselves to the dying sounds that were straying through the night.

Lisa was sitting beside the lieutenant and speaking of Greece. "You see, Marathon, what did Marathon use to be to me? A date, 490, I believe, but on that evening, with the evening glow falling across the plain, it sounds improbable, but I said to--to Katakasianopulos, I said, 'Katakasianopulos, I feel Miltiades here.'"

"Certainly, very remarkable," said the lieutenant. He was now so pa.s.sionately fond of hunting that he went out every day to shoot partridge; in the evenings he was very tired and could follow the conversation but feebly.

The professor was again talking with Count Hamilcar about dreams. "A dream is for us a reality like any other," he opined.

"Yes," rejoined the count somewhat indistinctly, for he did not remove his cigar from his mouth in speaking, "only a reality which we always cross out again on awaking. Those are experiences which we always throw into the wastebasket again."

"Good, very good," the professor continued eagerly, "but we do the same thing in our so-called waking life. When I awake, I look upon the dream with my waking eyes, and then it seems unreal to me; but these waking eyes are simply not focused for dreams. And then it is this way with all experiences: I firmly believe what I am experiencing at one moment, and the next moment I look back upon it and it seems to me unreal and false and I strike it out. So, if you please, the sky is now for me a great, beautiful hall, in which the many tiny s.h.i.+ning lights are standing side by side and twinkling at each other in the pretty summer night. That is real: what is it to me that I may perhaps look at it tomorrow through a telescope, that is through an eye which was not intended for me, and find that it then looks very different. Look, a shooting-star. When the Lithuanians see a shooting-star, they say, 'Some one is going to see his girl.' Certainly, at this moment that shooting-star is for me somebody going to see his girl. That is my 'experience.' But, if you please, tomorrow I shall a.s.suredly strike it out and think of asteroids or such things; but that doesn't prevent it for today from being for me some one going to see his girl, if you please."

All had looked up at the sky and seen the star, which glided hurriedly through the darkness, pa.s.sing other stars in a wide curve, as if trying to shun them, hastily and secretly.

"That striking out," remarked Count Hamilcar, "if we could only do it just when we wished."

Billy was still looking up at the stars. That about the star going to see his girl had suddenly restored to her the whole joyful impatience of her love-affair, and she felt as if she were one of that great secret company of those who are hastening here on earth silently and hurriedly through the night to meet their beloved.

Upstairs in her room Billy kissed Marion and said, "Tonight let us sleep, and sleep soundly. But Marion, don't look so at me, as if I had died."

Marion tried to say something, but then stole anxiously and in silence from the room.

"Lina," Betty directed the chambermaid, "tomorrow I wish to sleep late, and no one, do you hear?--no one must disturb me."

Left alone, she began to walk up and down quietly and busily. She changed her clothes, putting on a brown cloth dress, put on her hat, wrapped herself in her rain-coat, took her umbrella, wrote on a slip of paper "I am with him" and laid it on her dressing-table, and then sat there like a traveler in a station waiting for her train. Outside it thundered at intervals. Downstairs in the sleeping house the old familiar voices of the clocks called to each other through the silent rooms.

Billy softly descended into the garden by way of the back stairs. Heavy clouds hung in the sky. Tonight the whole world was full of voices and sounds; a gust struck the trees and made them murmur with excitement.

Withered leaves chased with a rustle along the path before Billy.

Somewhere a window-shutter creaked, a branch groaned. It was as if an Event were straying through the gloom and waking the sleeping garden.

Billy went very quickly, as quickly as in her childhood, when she had wished to pa.s.s through the dark living-room to the brightly lighted nursery. A flash darted across the sky and s.n.a.t.c.hed the darkness, like a black coverlet, from the pond, from the willows pensively bending over the reeds, from the water-lilies lying quietly in all the blackness; but all this seemed as strange to Billy as if she had never seen it. She hastened farther, thinking and feeling but one thing: to be there by the lime-tree with him--there was security, there the storm would have been weathered. As she issued from the park, another flash illumined the landscape, and she saw a black figure, the pointed hood of the rain-coat drawn over the head, leaning against the trunk of the lime-tree.

"Boris!" Billy cried out.

"Hush," answered Boris, "come." He laid her arm in his and drew her away with him. They walked over a damp meadow, then along a field of barley, where a corncrake rattled excitedly as if giving a signal.

"Where are we going?" asked Billy in a low voice.

Boris stopped. "You ask?" he said; "if you are afraid, I will lead you back. I will lead you to the house, you may be sure; there is still time."

"And you?" asked Billy hesitatingly.

"Ah, I!" replied Boris, and that sounded so sorrowful, so infinitely lonely, that Billy was again thrilled by that painful admiring compa.s.sion, which made her quite defenseless against Boris.

"No, no," she cried, "let us go."

They now crossed a piece of swampy land which was white with cotton-gra.s.s and softly smacked under their tread.

"That sounds," remarked Billy, "like the kisses chambermaids talk about," and she laughed at it. She felt strongly the need of laughing, of saying something jolly. Beyond the swamp the woods began. Boris stopped now and then to get his bearings in the darkness; he whistled once softly, and a whistle answered. At last they came on the forest road to a carriage; a man stood there--Billy saw this for an instant in the gleam of a flash of lightning, then again profound gloom.

Boris spoke in an undertone with somebody; they were talking of the thunder-storm and bad roads. She heard horses rattle their harness, then Boris pushed her into the carriage, climbed in himself, slammed the door, and the conveyance slowly got in motion on the uneven forest-road.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE GOSSIPS.]

Friedrich Wahlte

The carriage was cramped and dark, the raised windows rattled softly, and beyond them lay the woods and the night like curtains of black velvet. At times lightning flashes abruptly cast a bluish light into this darkness. It began to rain heavily; a loud, uniform rus.h.i.+ng sound enveloped the riding couple, and the drops drummed on the roof of the carriage and beat against the window-panes. Boris heaved a sigh, a deep sigh of contentment and relief. He drew Billy to him, pressed her tightly to him so that it almost pained her, and even shook her slightly.

"That's what I like, that's what I like!" he whispered. His voice no longer sounded tragic, but boyish and exuberant. And then he grew concerned: "But you are cold, of course; I have provided a cloak, I have provided everything." He wrapped her in a great silk cloak which smelled faintly of musk. "That feels good, doesn't it?--that is the cloak of old Mrs. von Worsky. My friend Ladislas gave it to me; you know he lives there on the border in Padony with his old mother: a good lad! He has done much for us; he knows everybody there on the border, he has smoothed our paths for us, and perhaps we shall see him before the night is done. Is the cloak warm?"

"Yes," said Billy, "but it smells of Madame Bonnechose."

Boris was vexed. "Curse it! It must not smell of Madame Bonnechose; nothing must smell of your home. That is gone, dropped out of sight."