VII
Beatrice
In Berlin, I drive from the Stettin to the Anhalt Station. The half-hour’s drive becomes a real way of thorns for me, so many are the memories which painfully revive in me. At first we pass through the street in which my friend Popoffsky, as an unknown, but yet misunderstood, man fought his first battles with poverty and passion. Now his wife and child are both dead; they died in this house on the left; and our friendship has turned into bitter hatred.
Here, on the right, are the restaurants frequented by artists and authors, the scenes of so many intellectual and erotic orgies. Here is the Cantina Italiana, where I used to meet with my fiancée three years ago, and where the first honorarium I received from Italy was spent in Chianti. There is the Schiffbauerdamm with the Pension Fulda, which we lived in when a young married pair. Here is my theatre, my bookseller, my tailor, my chemist.
What unhappy instinct leads the cabman to drive me through this via dolorosa full of buried memories, which at this late hour of the night rise again like ghosts? Why does he choose just the street in which is the restaurant, the “Black Pig,” well known as a favourite resort of Heine and E. T. A. Hoffmann? The restaurant keeper himself stands on the steps under the grotesque signboard. He looks at me without recognition. For a second the candelabrum within darts coloured rays through the numerous bottles in the window, and makes me live again a year of my life which abounded in grief and joy, friendship and love. At the same time, I feel keenly that it is all over, and must be buried to make place for something new.
I spent the night in Berlin. The next morning a deep rose-red flush in the East greeted me over the roofs. I remember having seen this rosy colour in Malmö on the evening of my departure. I leave Berlin, my second home, where I have spent my “second spring,” that is, my last. At the Anhalt Station, full of these memories, I give up all hope of the renewal of a spring and a love which can never return.
After a night in Tabor, whither the rosy glow followed me, I travel through the Bohemian mountains to the Danube. There the railway ends, and I traverse the Danube plain, which extends to Grein, in a carriage. We pass between orchards of apple and pear trees, cornfields and green meadows. At last, on a hill on the other side of the river, I discover the little church in which I never was, but which I know well as the central point of the landscape which extends before the house where my child was born. It is now two years since that unforgettable month of May. I pass through villages and convents; along the road there rise innumerable penitential chapels, hills crowned with crucifixes, votive pictures, monuments, reminding one of accidents and sudden deaths by lightning, and in other ways. At the end of my pilgrimage there certainly await me the twelve stations of the Cross. Every hundred paces the Crucified meets me with His crown of thorns, and instils into me courage to bear scourging and crucifixion. I painfully convince myself beforehand, that she, as I might have known, will not be there. Now, since my wife can no more divert the domestic storm, I must expect tit-for-tat from the old parents, whom I left under unpleasant circumstances, though against my will. I come accordingly for the sake of peace to be punished, and when I have passed the last village and the last crucifix, my feelings are something like those of a condemned man awaiting execution.
I had left an infant six weeks old, and I found a little girl of two and a half. She turned on me a searching look, but not one of dislike, as though she wished to find out whether I had come for her own or her mother’s sake. After she had assured herself of the former, she let herself be embraced, and put her little arms round my neck. I am in a mood like Faust’s when he exclaims, “the earth has me again,” but more tender and purer. I am delighted in taking the little one on my arm, and feeling her heart beat against mine. Love for a child turns a man into a woman; it is sexless and heavenly, as Swedenborg says. This is the beginning of my education for heaven. But I have not yet done penance enough.
Briefly put, the situation is as follows: My wife is staying with her married sister, for her grandmother, who is in possession of the family property, has vowed that our marriage shall be dissolved, so intensely does she hate me, on account of my ingratitude and other matters. So I with my child remain as a welcome guest of my mother-in-law, and contentedly accept the hospitality offered me, under present circumstances, for an indefinite time. My mother-in-law, with the placable and submissive mind of a deeply religious woman, has forgiven me all.
.—I occupy the room in which my wife has spent her two years of separation. Here she has suffered, while I suffered in Paris. Poor, poor woman! Are we so severely punished, because we have trifled with love?
During the evening meal the following incident happens. In order to help my little daughter, who cannot yet help herself, I touch her hand quite gently and kindly. The child utters a cry, draws her hand back, and casts at me a glance full of alarm. When her grandmother asks what is the matter, she answers, “He hurts me.” In my confusion I am unable to utter a word. How many persons have I deliberately hurt, and hurt still, though without intending it. At night I dream of an eagle which tears at my hand for some unknown crime.
In the morning my daughter visits me; her manner is gentle and coaxing. She drinks coffee with me, and remains standing by my writing-table while I show her pictures. We are already good friends, and my mother-in-law is glad that she has someone to help her in educating the little one. In the evening I accompany her going to bed, and hear her prayers. She is a Catholic, and when she bids me pray and make the sign of the cross, I remain silent, for I am a Protestant.
.—Everything is in confusion. My mother-in-law’s mother, who lives not far from here on the bank of the stream, intends to have an expulsion order made out against me. She wants me to go at once, and threatens if I disobey to disinherit her daughter. My mother-in-law’s sister, a good woman, who is separated from her husband, invites me to stay with her in the neighbouring village till the storm has blown over. She comes herself to fetch me. From the top of a hill about a mile off, one looks into a circular valley, like the crater of a volcano, out of which rise many smaller hills covered with pines. In the middle of this crater lies the village with its church, and above, on a precipitous height, a castle built in the medieval style; between, lie fields and meadows watered by a stream which rushes into a ravine below the castle.
This peculiar and unique landscape makes a strange impression on me, and the thought arises: “I must have seen it somewhere before, but where, where?”
In the zinc bath in the Hôtel Orfila, traced out in oxide of iron! Without question, it is the same landscape!
My aunt goes down with me into the village, where she owns a three-storeyed house. The capacious edifice also contains a baker’s and butcher’s shop, and a restaurant. It has a lightning-conductor, because the store was a year ago struck by lightning. When my good aunt, who is as rigidly religious as her sister, conducts me to the room assigned for my use, I remain fixed on the threshold as if arrested by a vision. The walls are painted a rose-colour, which reminds me of the flush of the dawns which accompanied me on my journey. The curtains are also rose-coloured, and the windows so full of flowers that the daylight is subdued by them. Everything is spotlessly clean, and the bed with its canopy supported by four pillars is like that of a maiden. The whole room with its appurtenances is a poem, and speaks of a soul which only half lives upon earth. The Crucified is not there, but the Blessed Virgin is, and a vessel of holy water guards the entrance against evil spirits.
A feeling of shame seizes me, and I fear to sully the ideal of a pure heart which has erected this temple to the Virgin over the grave of her only love, who has been dead ten years, and in confusion I attempt to decline the kindly offer. But the good lady insists: “It will do you good, if you sacrifice your earthly love to the love of God, and of your child. Believe me, this thornless love will preserve your peace of mind and cheerfulness of spirit, and under the protection of the Virgin you will sleep quietly.”
I kiss her hand as a sign of gratitude for her sacrifice, and consent with a feeling of humility of which I had not thought myself capable. The powers seem to be gracious to me, and to have arranged the sufferings they have ordained for my improvement. Still, for some reason or other, I wish to sleep another night in Saxen, and put off my change of residence till the next day. So I return with my aunt to my child. Looking at the house from the street, I discover that the lightning-conductor is fastened exactly above my bed.
What an infernal coincidence! It makes me think again that I am the subject of a personal persecution. I also notice that my window commands a pleasant prospect, looking out as it does on a poorhouse occupied by released criminals and sick people, among whom several are dying. A sorry spectacle truly, to have continually before one’s eyes!
In Saxen I pack my things and prepare for departure. I part with sorrow from my child, who has become so dear to me. The cruelty of the old woman, who has succeeded in separating me from wife and child, enrages me. Angrily I shake my fist against a painting of her which hangs over my bed, and utter an imprecation against her. Two hours later a terrible storm breaks over the village. One lightning flash succeeds another, the rain pours in torrents, the sky is pitch dark.
The next day I am in Klam, where the rose-coloured room awaits me. Over my aunt’s house there hangs a cloud in the shape of a dragon. They tell me that a house quite close by has been struck by lightning, and that the torrents of rain have injured haystacks and carried away bridges.
On the 10th of September a cyclone has devastated Paris, and that under most extraordinary circumstances. Without any warning, it suddenly rises behind St. Sulpice in the Jardin de Luxembourg, grazes the Théâtre du Châlet and the police station, and disappears behind the St. Louis hospital, after it has torn up iron gratings for fifty yards round. Regarding this cyclone and the one in the Jardin des Plantes, my theosophical friend asks me, “What is a cyclone? Is it an ebullition of hatred, the eruption of some passion, the effluence of some spirit?”
It must be a coincidence, or rather, more than a coincidence, that in a letter which crosses his, I have asked him as one initiated in the occult doctrines of the Hindus, “Can the philosophers of Hindustan cause cyclones?”
I began to suspect the adepts in magic of persecuting me on account of my gold-making or my obstinacy, and of wishing to bring me in complete subjection to their society. In the German Mythology of Rydberg and in Wärend och Widarne of Hilten-Cavallius, I had read that witches were in the habit of appearing in a storm or in short and violent gusts of wind. I mention this to show my mental condition before I fell in with Swedenborg’s teaching.
The sanctuary shines in white and rose, and the saint will soon join his disciple, who summons him from their common fatherland in order to revive the memory of the man who was more highly equipped with spiritual gifts than any born of woman in these modern times. France sent Anskar9 in the early middle ages to baptise Sweden; a thousand years later Sweden sent Swedenborg to re-baptise France by means of his disciple Saint-Martin. The Martinist orders, who know the role they have to play in the founding of a new France, will not undervalue the purport of these words, and still less the significance of the above-mentioned millennium.