Problematic Characters Part 45

CHAPTER IX.

When the carriage stopped on the open s.p.a.ce before the door, surrounded by trees, and covered with dry brown leaves as with a carpet, Oldenburg appeared up stairs on a gallery, which divided the two stories and ran around the whole house. The next moment he was down at the door and shook Oswald heartily by the hand.

"There you are," he said. "I was almost afraid you would have done like most people, who, when they have once been in my company, do not care to renew the experiment."

"I do not know, baron, whether you show yourself to most people as you did to me," said Oswald; "if that is so, then I have at least a different taste from most people."

"Really, a salam in _optima forma_," said Oldenburg, smiling; "a couple of old gray-bearded sons of Mohammed could not do it better. Nothing is wanting but that we should now kiss the tips of our fingers. But come into the house; we'll be more-comfortable there."

They stepped into a small hall, from which they reached, by means of an easy, wide staircase, a larger hall in the upper story, which was lighted from above. From here they went into a large, quite high room; a gla.s.s door opened upon the broad gallery, which afforded an uninterrupted view upon the sea, and seemed to overhang the steep precipice, although there was still a distance of about thirty yards between it and the brink. Below was the surf howling between the s.h.i.+ngle and huge blocks of stone.

The view from this elevated point out upon the blue, boundless sea, and upon the high white chalk-cliffs, which stretched far to the left, and ended finally in a cape crowned with the beech forest of Grenwitz, was indescribably grand, and Oswald could not suppress a loud cry of admiration.

"Well," said Oldenburg, leaning over the railing of the gallery by Oswald's side, "was it not a good idea of my worthy grandfather's to build a house at this point, which, by the way, is one of the highest in the whole island. I recall the old gentleman yet, with his long snow-white beard, and can see him even now sitting here on this gallery, and looking out with his dying eye upon the sea, like the king of Thule. He revered it as a grandson reveres his grandmother, and loved it as a young man loves the idol of his heart. I wish he could have bequeathed to me, beside his size, also his capacity of enjoying the beauties of nature. Unfortunately I have missed inheriting that."

"Are you in earnest?" asked Oswald.

"Certainly," said Oldenburg. "I have often enough regretted it in travelling, and been heartily ashamed of my aesthetic stupidity, which kept me from feeling anything at places where others would make summersets for pleasure or weep sentimental tears. I tried in vain to do like the English misses and sob: Beautiful, very fine indeed! I read in vain in Byron and Lamartine till I knew them nearly by heart,--it was all in vain. I never could do more than poor Werther, who saw in nature but a well-varnished picture; and a couple of beggar-boys, who fought in the sand by the sea-sh.o.r.e, or a poor fellah turning his heavy water-wheel, were more interesting to me than the Gulf of Naples and the Nile. I delight in men and the manners of men,--Nature is beyond me."

"But why do you exile yourself into this solitude? Why do you, who could so easily afford it, not rather live on the _Boulevard des Capucines_, or in Pall-Mall, London, than on this northern sh.o.r.e?"

"For the same reason that the falcon is made to fast twenty-four hours, before he is taken out on the gazelle-hunt,--to sharpen my hunger after my favorite dish. When I have lived here a few weeks my senses become fresh again and susceptible, and the sight of man's busy life has its old charms for me once more."

"And how much longer do you expect to stay here?"

"I do not know yet. My Solitude--this is the name my grandfather gave this place--pleases me this time better than usual. I have led an odd sort of life for the last few years, and seen so many children of Adam of various races and degrees of civilization that at last they all looked alike to me, an evidence that my senses had become dull and a new fast was necessary. You and Czika must see to it that I do not starve altogether."

"And where is our little foundling?"

"Somewhere on the heath, where she lies down in the blooming broom and stares at the sky; or on the beach, where she climbs about among the rocks and claps her hands with delight if a wave wets her bare feet.

She has not been persuaded yet to put on shoes; I leave her in perfect freedom since she declared, on the second day of her stay here, when I refused to let her run out in the most inclement weather: Czika dies if she cannot go in the rain!"

"Does she pine after her mother?"

"Do you really think that brown woman, whom I at least saw only in pa.s.sing, is her mother?"

"Certainly! The likeness between Czika and the Brown Countess is unmistakable."

"From whom have I heard that expression before?" said Oldenburg, thoughtfully; "probably from you the other day, but it sounded so familiar to me. Does the name come from you?"

"No; from Frau von Berkow," said Oswald, fixing his eye upon Oldenburg.

"Ah, indeed!" said the baron.

This was the first time that Melitta's name was mentioned by the two men, and it was characteristic enough, that at once a pause occurred in the conversation.

"On what occasion did Frau von Berkow make the acquaintance of the gypsy?" asked the baron, after a little while.

Oswald told him in a few words the story of the Brown Countess, as he had heard it from Melitta.

Oldenburg smiled. "Yes," he said, "now I remember. Frau von Berkow told me that anecdote some years ago. The story is a very pretty one, especially for those who take an interest in Frau von Berkow, because it is very characteristic of the amiable lady, who is as kind-hearted as she is fond of such little _escapades_."

The baron said this as simply and calmly as if there had never been a period when he would have risked his life for a smile of this "amiable lady."

"But had we not better go in?" he continued; "I see Hermann, my raven and my factotum, has put all kinds of nice things on a table, and there comes Thusnelda, his wife and my nurse, to invite us solemnly to take some refreshments."

A venerable-looking old lady of large size appeared in the gla.s.s door, dropped a low courtesy and said:

"Master, the table is set."

"Very well," said Oldenburg. "Have you seen the Czika?"

"I thought she was here," replied the matron, looking anxiously around.

"No. Bring her up if she comes while we are at table. Just go and look out for her. Come, doctor, I hope the long drive has made you hungry, or at least thirsty; Thusnelda has prepared for both cases."

While they took their seats at the richly served table, Oswald looked around in the room. The large apartment was well filled with chairs and sofas of various shapes, which seemed to have no fixed place, and a large writing-table of oak. Along the walls stood huge oak cases filled with books. Books were lying upon the tables and on the sofas and chairs; books strewed the floor. A few busts, copies from the antique, and some large engravings, were the only ornaments of the room, which evidently had no special claims to elegance. Between two of the bookcases, where an engraving ought to have hung, there was a green silk curtain, which conceded either an awkwardly placed window, or a portrait that was not to be seen by the curious eye of stray visitors.

Then his attention returned once more to the baron himself, who appeared to him to-day, in his long coat of yellow linen hanging loosely around his tall, thin form, quite another man. But then the altered costume struck Oswald even less than the changed expression in his face. The ironical line near the mouth, which even the close black beard could not effectually conceal, the small, sharp wrinkles on the high forehead, around the eyes, and near the nostrils--all these were to-day effaced by a benevolent smile, which gave an expression of mildness and goodness to the usually sharp eyes. Oswald could hardly trust his eyes, although he had overcome much of his former prejudice against the baron. Now the thought that a woman could and might love this man with her whole heart did not appear to him any more so very strange as at the ball at Barnewitz. He thought of the leaf in Melitta's alb.u.m; he thought of his own words: This man will never be happy, because he will never desire to be happy, and of Melitta's answer: "Therefore this man is taken out of my life, as his portrait is taken out of my alb.u.m;" and he said to himself: Ah, he might have been happy if he had desired to be so! Why did he not desire it? What has parted the two?--Which of them spoke the word that parted them, as it seems, forever?

These thoughts no longer awakened in Oswald that wild jealousy which had torn his heart on the day when he first met the baron in the forest. But the mysterious darkness which brooded over these events which he could not penetrate, and, what was worse, which he did not dare to penetrate, filled his soul with that sadness, that pity, which we feel for ourselves when our devotion is interrupted just when we most desire to pour out our overflowing heart in prayer.

Oswald tried to master his emotion; he felt as if the baron's sharp eyes were able to read what was going on in his soul. But the latter remained apparently quite unconcerned, and entirely preoccupied by the subject of their conversation: Czika and the Brown Countess. Both men tried in vain to solve the enigma of this remarkable affair with all their ingenuity. What could have induced the Brown Countess to leave her child, which she seemed to love most devotedly, so unceremoniously in the hands of strangers? How could she gather courage to part with her at the very moment when the brutal jokes of the young n.o.blemen--young Count Grieben's groom had told the whole story to Oldenburg's coachman--and the playful elopement with the child had excited her rage to such a degree? Had she given the girl to Oswald or to the baron, or had she not given her but merely sold her, postponing the day of payment for a month, in the hope that the two men, or either of them, would in the mean time become so attached to the child that she would receive a higher price for her?

"My special apprehension," said Oldenburg, "is that the Brown Countess may repent of her bargain and take the child again from me, or that the Czika cannot resist the longing after her young life, and vanishes some fine morning or other. I confess it would be a severe blow for me. Your prophecy that I would find in the sweet child a treasure more precious than Aladdin's magic lamp, seems to have been fulfilled. I should like to be the child's father! I should like to endow this silent heart with speech, to see my own thoughts beautified and enn.o.bled in the new language. I should like to bind her to me with all the ties that can bind a daughter to her father, a father to his daughter--of course only in order to see these ties torn, and some jackanapes come and ask me to throw her into his arms, because his coat fits him a little better than his neighbor's! I am now in that period of life when one longs to have children; when one is not a Swiss, who, you know, proposed to eat children, though not from love; I long for them as a tired wanderer desires a staff to support his weary limbs. When we feel that we have reached the turning-point in our life, and that we must go down hill henceforth, while the land of our youth is gradually disappearing behind the top of the hill, then we would like to hear joyous children's voices reach us from the other side, which recall to us our own happy childhood. You will ask me why I do not yield to my prosaic desires and marry?--Or perhaps you will not ask me so; for you will see yourself that marriage is out of question for a man who has spent the ten best years of his life in all kinds of _liaisons dangereuses_ and _innocentes_, I do not want a wife who does not wish me to say to her: I love you! and how can I tell her so without making myself ridiculous in my own eyes, after having said so to I know not how many in all the languages I know? No, no! With such views a man may become a Turk and establish a harem, but he is too bad in all conscience for marriage in the highest and purest sense, which is a wonderful alchemy changing two into one."

"And yet," said Oswald, "genuine love has a purifying, hallowing power, which scatters all doubts as the rays of the sun scatter fogs and mists. True love, like true hatred, wipes 'all foolish stories from the tablets of memory,' and changes us in an instant from wild barbarians into h.e.l.lenes of delicate feelings. Rude strength, which before simply a.s.serted itself in destruction or in production, now a.s.sumes a pleasing shape, and where before it created a Siva, whose fiery glance destroyed all creatures, it now creates an Olympic Zeus, who blesses all creation with his paternal eyes."

"Well said," replied the baron; "will you try this hock, a wine of some merit,--very well said and also perhaps true,--only not for Problematic Characters."

"What do you call Problematic Characters?"

"It is an expression which Goethe uses in a place that has ever given me much trouble of mind. There are problematic characters, says Goethe,--I believe in his Fact and Fiction,--who are not equal to any position in which they may happen to be, and who are not satisfied with any. This, he adds, produces a violent contradiction, and leads to the consumption of life without enjoyment.--It is a fearful word of his, for it is a sentence of death p.r.o.nounced with Olympic calmness on a numerous cla.s.s of men, of whom we have but too many in our day, who are very good men and very bad musicians.--There is Czika!"

"Where?"

"Behind you!"

Oswald turned round. Within the open door which led out on the balcony stood the pretty child, surrounded by the red light of the setting sun.

Her luxuriant bluish black hair fell in long ringlets on both sides of her face upon her shoulders, which rose from a blue Turkish blouse, while a light shawl of red silk was tied around her slender waist Turkish trousers reached down to her feet. When she had seen that there was a stranger in the room, she had been about to slip away again as stealthily as she had come, till the baron's words had arrested her and Oswald had turned around. At seeing him a joyous smile pa.s.sed over her dark, solemn face, and her brown gazelle eyes looked almost tenderly up at him, as he now was standing before her, holding one of her hands in his own, and parting with the other her luxuriant hair.

"Czika knows you," she said. "You are very kind. You love the poor; the poor love you."

"A declaration of love!" said Oldenburg, who had remained seated at the table; "how many have you had, doctor, this week? Doctor, you are a dangerous man, and I shall see myself compelled to forbid you the house?"

"Why are you not always here?" asked Czika, turning her large eyes from the baron upon Oswald. "Czika will sit by you near the great water; Czika will gather flowers for you on the heath. Why are you not always here?"

"He cannot be always here, Czika," said the baron, "but he will come very often. Won't you, doctor?"