The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Volume Vii Part 19

SONNSFELD.

You pick them up and weave them into a "nice innocent little influence"

for yourself. Eh? An influence that has already earned you three city houses, five estates, and a carriage-and-four. Have a care that the Crown Prince does not auction off all these objects under the gallows-tree some fine day.

EVERSMANN.

Oh, but your Ladys.h.i.+p must have slept badly. Pray spare me these--predictions and prophesyings, which are made up of whole cloth.

His Royal Highness the Crown Prince is far too much, of a philosopher to take such revenge on a man who has no more dealings with His Majesty than to fill his pipe each evening, to braid his pigtail each morning, and to shave him in the good old German fas.h.i.+on every second day. Have I made my meaning clear?

[_He goes out._]

SONNSFELD.

Go your way, you old sinner! You may pretend to be ever so honest and simple--we know you and your like. Oh, what a life we lead here in this Court! Cannons thunder in the garden under our windows every morning or else they send up a company of soldiers to accustom us to early rising.

After the morning prayer the Princess knits, sews, presses her linen, studies her catechism, and, alas! is forced to listen to a stupid sermon every day. At dinner, we get very little to eat; then the King takes his afternoon nap. He's forever quarreling with the Queen, they have scarcely a good word to say to each other, and yet the entire family are expected to look on at His Majesty's melodious snore-concert, and even to brush away the flies from the face of the sleeping Father of his country. If my Princess did not possess so much natural wit and spirit, the sweet creature would be quite crushed by such a life. If the King only knew that she is learning French secretly, and can almost write a polite little note already--! I hear her coming.

SCENE II

PRINCESS WILHELMINE _comes in, carrying a letter_.

WILHELMINE (_timidly_).

Can any one hear us?

SONNSFELD.

Not unless the walls have ears. Is the letter written?

WILHELMINE.

I hardly dare send it, dear Sonnsfeld. I know there are a hundred mistakes in it.

SONNSFELD.

A hundred? Then the letter must be much longer than Your Highness first planned it.

WILHELMINE.

I wrote that I fully appreciate the value of the services offered me, but that my position forces me to refuse any aid to my education which cannot be attained at least by the help of my mother, the Queen.

SONNSFELD.

Is that what you have written? And made a hundred mistakes? In that case we are just where we were before. I appreciate that an eighteen-year-old Princess has to consider history, posterity and so forth--but this conscientiousness will be your ruin. The King will continue to make a slave of you, the Queen to treat you as a child. You are the victim of the conflict between two characters who both perhaps desire what is best for you, but who are so totally different that you will never know whom or which one to please. The Crown Prince has made himself free--and how did he do it? Only by courage and independence. He tore himself loose from the oppressive bondage imposed on him by the caprice of others, and won the means to complete his education. And now he sends to you from Rheinsberg his friend, the Prince Hereditary of Baireuth, to be a support and protection to you and to the Queen--so that here in this Court where they drum, trumpet, and parade all day long, you may not finally, in your despair, seize a musket yourself and join the Potsdam Guards!

WILHELMINE.

You have a sense of humor, my dear Sonnsfeld. It is all well enough for my brother to make plans and send out emissaries, when he is safe in Rheinsberg. He knows that the path to the freedom he has won led past the very foot of the scaffold. I am of the s.e.x whose duty it is to be patient. My father is so good at heart, gentler possibly, in his true self, than is my mother. She indeed, absorbed in her political ambitions, often turns from me with a harshness that accords ill with mother-love. It is my fate to endure this life. Ask yourself, dear friend, how could I trust to a chance adventurous stranger whom my brother sends to me from out of his wild, artistic circle in Rheinsberg--sends to me to be my knight and paladin? Such a thought could have been conceived only in the brains of that group of poets.

I'll confess to you in secret that I should greatly enjoy being in the midst of the Rheinsberg merriment, disguised of course. But I'm in Berlin--not in Rheinsberg, and so I have gathered up my meagre sc.r.a.ps of French and thanked the Prince of Baireuth for his offer in a manner which is far more a refusal than an acceptance.

[_Hands_ SONNSFELD _the letter_.]

SONNSFELD.

And I am to dispatch this letter? [_With droll pathos_.] No, Your Highness, I cannot have anything to do with this forbidden correspondence.

WILHELMINE.

No joking please, Sonnsfeld. It was the only answer I could possibly send to the Prince's tender epistle.

SONNSFELD.

Impossible!--To become an accomplice to a forbidden correspondence in this Court might cost one's life.

WILHELMINE.

You will make me angry!--here, dispatch this letter, and quickly.

SONNSFELD.

No, Princess. But I know a better means, an absolutely sure means of dispatching the letter to its destination, and that is--[_She glances toward a door in the background_] deliver it yourself.

[_She slips out of a side door_.]

SCENE III

_The_ PRINCE HEREDITARY OF BAIREUTH, _dressed in the French taste of the period, as different as possible from the king's favorite garb, comes in cautiously._

WILHELMINE (_aside_).

The Prince of Baireuth!

THE PRINCE (_aside_).

Her very picture! It is the Princess! [_Aloud_.] I crave Your Highness'

pardon that my impatience to deliver the greeting of Your Royal brother the Crown Prince in person--

WILHELMINE.

The Prince of Baireuth places me in no slight embarra.s.sment by this early visit.

PRINCE.

The visit was not paid to you, Princess, but to this n.o.ble and venerable castle, these stairways, these galleries, these winding corridors--it was a visit of recognizance, Your Highness, such as must precede any important undertaking.