PART ONE

A POET IN THE MAKING

THE HERITAGE.

I.

Trivial as the incident was, Albert Zorn often recalled it in later years and mused upon it even at an age when man no longer cherishes memories of early boyhood. How could he forget it? At the time it was momentous, overshadowing all else.

On his way to school that memorable morning he rambled dreamily through the narrow streets of Gunsdorf, a thousand fantasies in his boyish brain. It seemed as if Alladin’s lamp had been rubbed. He was to live in a castle, instead of in the modest quarters back of his father’s humble shop on Schmallgasse and wear a velvet coat and lacquered top-boots with silver spurs! What else would his father do with all that money? From what he had gleaned of his parents’ conversation they had received word from Amsterdam that a kinsman had died there and left them a fortune running into millions.

He was soon approaching the river near which was located the Franciscan cloister that housed his school. The swiftly flowing stream came tumbling down over rock and boulder and unseen rivulets gurgled mysteriously beneath glacial crusts in shadowy places. For it was at the beginning of April when there were still clinging remnants of the long hoary winter. Albert sauntered slowly, wistfully, his daydreams, stimulated by the sudden expectancy, commingling with the awakened sentiments of spring.

“Good morning, Al—ber’,” that imp, Shorty Fritz, welcomed him as he entered the classroom.

Albert’s air-castles were rudely shaken and his face grew livid. Fritz had drawled his name in the screechy voice of Hans the ragman, who wandered from door to door every morning, preceded by his donkey, which he coaxed to greater celerity by the mystic cry that sounded like “Al—ber’—Al—ber’”, the real meaning of which was only known to Hans and the drudging beast.

Ignoring the tantalizing donkey-call, he walked up to his seat, dropped his books and remained standing moodily, his small bluish eyes narrowed, his long fair hair falling unevenly over his neck and forehead.

“O, Fritz, what’s the difference between Balaam’s ass and a zebra?” Long Kunz, another classmate, called across the room.

“Balaam’s ass spoke Hebrew and the zebra speaks Zebrew,” returned Fritz with mock gravity.

Albert was still busying himself with his books, swallowing lumps and feigning indifference, but the allusions to his racial extraction pierced him like a dagger. He had heard this witticism before and it had never failed to lacerate his sensitive heart.

“Then what’s the difference between Hanse’s donkey and his namesake, Al—ber’?”

“None that I can see,” was the retort.

Still the victim of these sallies refrained from combat. Though usually not given to curbing his tongue—and his tongue was as sharp as that of any one in the class—he would not bandy words with his arch-enemies this morning. There was hope in the boy’s heart that the forthcoming inheritance would soon liberate him from these surroundings altogether.

Presently Christian Lutz’s tender arm was around his shoulders. Christian was his favorite classmate and always took his part in his encounters with those vexatious youngsters. While Albert was the quicker with his tongue, Christian was more ready with his fist.

“I have heard your father has become a millionaire,” Christian said. “Who’s left him this fortune—your father’s father?”

“Not my father’s father,” laughed Albert, the remembrance of the inheritance at once banishing the momentary bitterness from his heart. “My father’s father had no fortune to leave—he was a poor little Jew, with long whiskers as his only belongings.”

Though uttered in a soft, jocular voice, and only intended for Christian’s ears, it reached those of Fritz.

“Ha—ha!” he tittered. “Did you hear that, boys? Al—ber’s grandfather was a poor little Jew with long whiskers.”

“A poor little Jew with long whiskers!”

“A poor little Jew with long whiskers!”

“A poor little Jew with long whiskers!”

This refrain caught up by Long Kunz was accompanied by intermittent beating of the desks with drum-like regularity.

In a moment the classroom was in a wild uproar. Whistling, catcalls, imitations of braying asses, of squealing pigs, of crowing cocks, of bleating sheep, of neighing horses filled the air. The boys scampered and jumped and flung inkstands at the blackboard and kicked at the chairs to Fritz’s rhythmic tune of “A poor little Jew with long whiskers!”

“Silence!”

It was the intimidating voice of Father Scher.

The youngsters, frightened by the sudden entrance of the schoolmaster, made a dash for their seats and in their mad rush capsized the benches that came down with resounding crashes.

“Order!” shouted the schoolmaster.

Father Scher stood at his desk, his right arm raised menacingly, his smooth face crimson with rage, his eyes fairly popping out of their sockets, his saucer-like skull-cap shoved to the back of his shaven head.

Ominous silence, terror in every countenance.

The priest’s eyes shifted from side to side, taking in the overturned benches, the scattered text-books, the ink-bespattered blackboard.

“Who started this?”

No answer. The black-robed instructor took a step forward.

“Who started this?”

Restive shuffling of feet was the only response.

“I’ll flay the hide off everyone of you if you don’t tell me at once who started this disorder,” the angered teacher cried.

“Al—ber! Al—ber!” Hanse’s voice came from outside. It sounded like a voice in a deep forest. An irrepressible snicker ran through the room.

“Who did this—who did this?”

Scher was moving along the aisle, searching guilt in every countenance. Reaching Albert he halted and glowered at him. There was still mist in the boy’s eyes and his lips were twitching.

“So it’s you, is it? You know what to expect and are whimpering ahead of time, hey? You are always the source of all mischief in the class.” His steady eyes were peering at the boy’s agitated face. Then he added, “Now if you didn’t start this, who did?”

The insinuation increased the bitterness in the boy’s heart. He was biting the lining of his lip to hold his tears in check, but not a sound escaped him.

“Won’t you answer me?” The master’s voice was threatening.

Much as he hated Long Kunz and Shorty Fritz his pride forbade him to betray them.

Silently, grimly, the infuriated priest turned around and walked back toward the blackboard, the swishing of his cassock striking against his heels registering his measured, determined step. To the right of the blackboard stood a large, heavy, gnarled yellowish stick, an ever present warning to the class. Gripping the rattan firmly in his hand the priest faced about and retraced his steps, presently standing in front of Albert.

“Well, Albert?”

The instructor’s stormy blue eyes were riveted upon the boy and the heavy cane was suspended in the air.

Albert only tightened his lips more firmly.

“Speak!”

Scher’s voice trembled with wrath.

A scarcely perceptible smile appeared on the lower part of the boy’s face, which however did net escape the tantalized master.

Bang!

The stick came down with a crashing blow, but as Albert quickly turned aside it struck the table nearby and broke.

Baffled by defeat Father Scher grew more angered and swung the broken end of the cane up and down blindly, striking at his victim until he was exhausted, panting audibly.

Brandishing the fragment in his hand for a final blow, he missed his aim and his body swung around, sending his skull-cap to the floor. As he stooped to pick up his headgear—his shaven crown exposed to the gaze of the irreverent youngsters—the awed tension vanished and derisive laughter broke loose. In spite of his pain Albert’s jeering voice sounded louder than all the rest. His little eyes snapped diabolic mockery in his glittering pupils. From the rear of the room came the mimicking of a grunting sucking pig.

Confused and out of breath, Scher turned from side to side and his rolling eyes finally focused upon the grimacing face of that ragamuffin, Long Kunz.

“Take this!” the master aspirated and gave the boy a sharp cut. Kunz emitted a shriek that rang throughout the cloister.

“I didn’t do anything,” he wailed, scratching the smarting spot on his left shoulder—“it was he that started all the trouble.”

“Who is he?” demanded the instructor.

He brandished the cane, but without letting it fall on Kunz.

“Who is he?” he repeated.

“Al—ber’” Kunz mischievously piped up, drying his tears.

“So it is you—hey? I thought it couldn’t be anyone else.”

He turned upon Albert anew, the scorn of vengeance in his metallic voice.

“He said his grandfather was a little Jew with long whiskers and made everybody laugh,” added Kunz, seeking to curry the teacher’s favor.

“Hold your tongue!” Scher silenced the informer.

Then, again turning upon Albert, he grabbed him by his coat collar and dragged him to the corner of the room, showering blows as he pulled the boy after him.

“I only said this in jest to Christian and they began on me,” Albert cried defiantly and broke away from the priest.

The master walked back to his desk, breathing hard and muttering unintelligible syllables.

“Attention!” he presently called and rapped for order.

His blanched face, his piercing eyes, the skull-cap set awry on his shaven crown, the lead-edged ruler in his hand, made the class realize that he was no longer to be trifled with. There had been strange rumors about the ferocity of the master, so when he gave the order to fall in line for divine service every pupil had his left foot forward ready to march.

Albert was the last in line. For although his mother had had him excused from religious exercises, he always joined the class in the morning prayers. Not that he prayed or participated in the singing of hymns, but he loved the ceremonies of the cloister. There was something in the smell pervading the old stone walls, in the reverberating tones of the organ, in the soft light sifting in through the stained glass windows, in the statuary and effigies—everything about the monastic church filled him with mystery and with an indefinable sensuousness that, while it repelled him, caught his fancy and stirred in his soul a longing he was unable to fathom. The sound and color and scent and mystery of the church aroused in him the same emotion he felt when reading about Greek gods and goddesses. The chimes of the bells, the rich colors of the clergy’s robes at high mass, the pealing organ and the melodies of the choir—everything connected with the Franciscan cloister was so different from his father’s church, which seemed so colorless and held nothing to stir his imagination.

But no sooner did the chapel services commence than his mind began to wander. The prayers were meaningless to him even at that early age. The Catholic liturgy was distasteful to him. For boy that he was—scarcely more than eleven—he had already reasoned on matters of faith, and he had heard at home many a discussion about Voltaire and Rousseau, and of Kant’s _Kritik der reinen Vernunft_, which was then debated in every house of culture.

That morning more than on other mornings his brain was tortured by a thousand cross-currents. So many ideas crowded in upon his wearied brain that no single one was clear. They were all in confusion. The inheritance, his classmates’ insults, the flogging—they all seemed fast scudding clouds.

On his way out of school, Albert lagged behind under the high arches of the cloister, rancor in his breast. Tears of mortification were in his eyes.

He soon found himself before the tall image of the Christ which stood on a high pedestal under these arches. It was carved of wood, the face hideously distorted, the head hanging limply like a wilted sunflower, and a smear of blood between the projecting ribs was intended as a realistic touch. The morning sun, slanting under the vaults, fell upon the nails driven through the palms and feet and enhanced the ghastly figure. An unwelcome thought shot through the boy’s brain. No, no, he could not believe it; he could not believe what Father Scher had told the class about the Crucified. No, it could not be true. His people could not have stabbed the man who wore the crown of thorns and driven nails through his hand and feet. He knew his father and mother, who were most tender-hearted, and his grandfather, Doctor Hollmann, and his Uncle Joseph, both of whom had laid their lives down in their efforts to save the people in the last plague.

“They are lying—they are lying,” he muttered under his breath, almost sobbing—“all of them are lying—the priest and his books and Kunz and Fritz. Only the likes of them could mock and spit and torment and then put the blame upon others—”

He suddenly halted. He remembered the Hebrew school, which he attended after the hours at the cloister.

“_Pokad—pokadto—pokadli_—” he began to mumble the conjugation of the Hebrew verb he was then learning. Foreign as the language was to him he learned it much more easily than “the language of the dead Romans”, or even with greater facility than “the language of the Gods”, as he was wont to call Greek.

The Hebrew school was in a narrow alley back of Schmallgasse. It was a small square chamber which served as a school room by day and as a living room for the teacher and his family at night. It had been recently whitewashed—Passover was coming—and the Mizrach (a picture of Jerusalem with the Wailing Wall in the foreground) hung conspicuously upon the wall facing east—a tawny, fly-specked patch on a background of bluish white. Save for a long rectangular table flanked by unpainted wooden benches, and the teacher’s stool at the head of it, the room was bare.

Although he often mimicked the long bearded teacher, there was gladness in Albert’s heart, a gladness accompanied by a feeling of peace and security, as he wended his way to this school. No one mocked him here, no one imitated the ragman’s donkey-call. Here his very name gave him added distinction. Here he was a little prince, whom everybody loved and whose every flippant remark was carried from mouth to mouth, accompanied by convulsive laughter.

When he entered the Hebrew school the class was chanting the Shir H’Shirim, that exquisite lyric poem known as the Song of Songs. For it was Friday, when the class sang the Song of Solomon in the quaint, traditional melody of the Babylonians. The teacher, at the head of the table, was swaying his body from side to side, leading his class in his strangely tuneful sing-song.

Albert slid into his seat and joined in the chanting, though he perceived the furtive glances of his classmates, denoting even greater respects than ever. For they had all heard of the rumored inheritance.

“‘Look not upon me because I am black,’” they sang lustily from the Hebrew text. “‘Because the sun hath looked upon me; my mother’s children were angry with me and made me keeper of the vineyard, but my own vineyard I have not kept.’”

While his lips were lisping the liquid syllables of the poetical allegory his mind wandered to the sunny land of Canaan, the cradle of his people.

A pause followed; the teacher emitted a soft “oi” and soon proceeded with the next chapter.

“‘I am the rose of Sharon, the lily of the valley,’” the class struck up in lively sing-song, “‘As the lily is among the thorns so is my love among the daughters . . . Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples, for I am lovesick. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.’”

His flitting fancy was not following the words, but the pictures they conjured up in his brain. He was catching his breath, his spirits were astir. There was languor in his being. His sorrows were gone, the enchanting Song of Solomon caught his soul in its dulcet waves and rocked him into a trance . . .

II.

The evening proved still more exciting for Albert. He remained seated with rapt attention, listening to the talk of his elders. For relatives had dropped in—Uncle Salomon and Aunt Braunelle and Aunt Hanna—and all talked enthusiastically. His father, David, however, did most of the talking. There was something of the gambler’s optimism in David Zorn. It did not take much to make him over-sanguine. Pacing up and down the room, he ran his fingers through his well-trimmed blond beard, and from time to time paused to take a mouthful of Assmanshauser, his favorite vintage, of which he had opened a bottle in celebration of the great event.

The father’s feverish speech stirred the boy’s volatile imagination. Albert became restless and, unobserved, left the house for the Marktplatz, where he hoped to find a few loitering friends.

But the large square was deserted; not a single youngster in front of the town-hall, not a pedestrian in sight. Even the squeaky-voiced vendor of apple tarts had left his post in front of the bronze statue in the centre of the Marktplatz. There was quiet everywhere, the quietness of a town occupied by the enemy. For this was during the period when Gunsdorf was occupied by Napoleon’s troops.

Albert made his way back through one of the dark streets and as he turned a corner caught the sound of quick footsteps back of him. But before he had time to think he was struck with a fishing rod, and above the clatter of his fleeing assailant came the donkey-call in Shorty Fritz’s familiar voice—“Al—ber’! Al—ber’!”.

Albert wandered back home, a great pain in his head. As he walked past St. Andrew’s church, the pallor of the moon resting upon the Jesuit saints in the shadowy niches, he turned his eyes away with a sense of dread. There was venom in his heart. Somehow he blamed those sculptured saints for his present sufferings. Strange feelings possessed him. Melancholy enveloped his whole being. What if his father should bring back millions from Amsterdam? Every Fritz and every Kunz would still run after him and call: “Al—ber’”.

He entered his home stealthily as if he feared his mother might hear his very thoughts, and when he retired he lay in bed, a prey to strange fantasies. Soon, however, his roving thoughts, like twilight merging into night, turned into a web of dreams . . .

The world was coming to an end. God was standing in a garden of colorful flowers placed in the midst of waving wheat-fields, the marble bust of the broken Grecian goddess in his grandfather’s garden glistening in the sun. Then God rolled up the nodding flowers and waving grain stalks as one rolls up a carpet and, after placing them in a huge wagon, lifted up a great heap of apple blossoms and honeysuckle and piled them, too, into the van.

“Yes, all this goes to Amsterdam,” God was saying to Albert’s father, who was gathering armsful of golden leaves and loading them into the large vehicle.

Then Uncle Salomon climbed a high ladder—it was the same ladder the sexton climbed to trim the candles in the great chandelier—and took the sun out of the sky. For a moment he held it in the hollow of his hands, as the sexton often did when filling the large lamp with oil, while Johann Traub, the tailor, who stood nearby, donned a white shroud.

It sounded strange to hear Johann speak Hebrew, for Albert knew the tailor was dead and he had only spoken German, and he wondered if all dead people spoke Hebrew. But then Uncle Salomon began to climb down the ladder, with the sun under his arm, and it grew darker and darker—and only a few stars, suspended from the sky by rainbow-colored ribbons, were emitting bits of flashing light, and presently the gorgeous ribbons broke and the stars dropped like live sparks flying out of a chimney on a winter night . . .

“Everything packed?”

It was the voice of God, who was now seated on the box of the colossal van, and lashing the fiery steeds, the van disappeared in a cloud of silvery dust, leaving Albert behind in darkness and in tears. He peered into space, but could see nothing—nothing but an endless stretch of darkness. Finally he began to move aimlessly and wandered and wandered until he reached a freshly dug grave. Leb, the grave-digger, with spade in hand, was in the grave, digging deeper and deeper and singing merrily: “Everybody is dead—everybody is dead!” he hummed in his Westphalian dialect. Then he turned around and said, “Shove him in.”

There was no one else around but himself. Albert wondered to whom the grave-digger was speaking. Presently he noticed a very aged woman, a toothless hag. She stepped forward, holding the head of a man in her apron. Harry shuddered at the sight of the decapitated head and wanted to flee, but could not move. He stood paralyzed. He wanted to cry but his voice was gone. Then the toothless hag flung the head into the grave, gave a fiendish, blood-curdling laugh, and jumped in after it and began to dance. She danced as he had often seen drunken peasants dance—shaking her head from side to side and moving her legs wearily.

“Now I must run—they are coming,” the grave-digger exclaimed and suddenly vanished.

Albert trembled in every limb. He was again alone, with nothing but the open grave before him. The darkness around him seemed impenetrable. He could not see an inch away. Only strange voices of invisible men reached his ears, with the sound of autumn leaves in his ears. Then flashes of lightning came and revealed to him a line of men, in single file, coming through a gap in a ruined wall. He could not see the men’s faces but they wore little crucifixes over their breasts and swayed ornamental containers of frankincense such as he had seen in the Franciscan cloister. The next moment a strange light appeared and he saw himself surrounded by black robed priests, with mitres on their heads, and one of them gave him a sharp cut with a fishing rod and jeered. “Your inheritance!—your inheritance!”

“What’s the matter, Albert?—You gave such a shriek.”

He opened his eyes and beheld his mother at the foot of his bed.

“I had a dreadful dream—” he muttered.

“Always your dreams,” the mother said, smiling affectionately, as she walked out of the room.

III.

Weeks of tantalizing suspense followed. The letters that arrived from his father stirred Albert’s imagination. They seemed to come from distant lands, far, far away. And the letters were full of adventurous episodes: of nights spent in forests because of a broken axle, of weary tramps because of the horse’s bleeding leg, of halts at the frontier, and of numerous other perilous mishaps. “But,” as the optimistic David Zorn put it, “the road to success is always paved with rough stones.” His letter from Amsterdam was encouraging. No, he could not tell the extent of the estate, but it was huge. The tone of his succeeding letters, however, soon grew less and less reassuring, hinting at intervening difficulties, and he finally announced that he would return home without the millions as the matter was necessarily complicated and he could carry on the rest of the negotiations through correspondence.

His father’s return without riches was a stunning blow to the youth. It meant renewed drudgery and further contact with Father Scher and Kunz and Fritz. True, his father had not yet abandoned hope—he never did abandon hope—but Albert realized there were no prospects for a castle—at least not for the present and no immediate relief from the Franciscan school! Everything was the same as of old; no change, no excitement, nothing but the same monotonous business of irregular verbs, meaningless characters that stood for figures, the same blackboard and alongside of it another yellow stick in place of the broken one with whose every projecting knot and gnarl Albert was so familiar. It was a disheartening scene to see his father alight from the post chaise without a single bag of gold!

A few moments later came the great disappointment, the final blow. Like the glad tidings, it came in the form of a letter from Holland one rainy day in August. The humble shop in Schmallgasse was deserted save for David who, as usual, was thoughtfully turning the leaves of his ledger and jotting down some figures on the margin of a page. Zorn was everlastingly balancing the book, and the more he balanced them the less they balanced in his favor.

One of the saddest scenes of Albert’s early life took place on the afternoon following his father’s departure for Hamburg, to get financial assistance from his brother, Leopold Zorn, a banker.

The mother was alone in the little shop, alone with her thoughts. She was not thinking of her husband’s reverses nor was she brooding over her own deprivations. She was wondering what would become of Albert, what would become of his promising gifts. For while she frequently complained of his idleness and of his perverseness she was confident that talent lay slumbering in the boy’s being. True, she had other children but her heart and hopes were centered upon her first-born. No matter what might become of the others, nothing must stand in Albert’s way.

A new idea struck her and the thought of it sent a gleam of sunshine to her dark eyes. She had a pearl necklace of great value and diamond earrings that might fetch a handsome price; at least sufficient to see her son through _Gymnasium_ and the University. If she could not make a banker of him, which was her cherished ambition, let him be a scholar.

But the next moment she remembered her husband. Adornment was his life. He had often remonstrated against her aversion for wearing jewels.

After a space she saw a way out. Ludwig Grimm, the money-lender at the Marktplatz, would advance her a considerable amount on her necklace. In order to spare her husband’s feelings she would not tell him of this until business had improved when she could redeem her valuables. No one need know of this—not a soul—and she was sure Grimm would tell no one.

Albert came into the shop as his mother was about to leave on her secret errand. The boy’s eyes were downcast, there was pallor in his cheeks. For he, too, had done his share of brooding since the last ray of hope of the heritage was gone.

“Mother,” he said abruptly, “I’ll take no more private lessons. I—”

“Albert!”

She had hired a music teacher to teach him the violin, and her present ejaculation was the sudden outlet of her accumulated grief.

For a brief moment Albert weakened, his mother’s evident unhappiness checked his flow of words, but he soon gained courage.

“Mother, dear, I’ll be no burden to you,” he burst out. “I know—I understand—I won’t let you spend your last _groschen_ on me—”

“Albert!” she cried, reproach and grief mingled in her tone. “You won’t break your mother’s heart. Since when have my children become a burden to me?”

“But, mother dearest,” the boy begged, tears in his eyes, “I am old enough to be apprenticed—”

“And give up all hope?—Albert!”

The mere intimation of surrender—giving up the chance of becoming a great man, a scholar if not a banker—cut her to the very heart.

The boy trembled perceptibly. His mother had touched a vibrating chord in his being. For every thought of his, every dream and fancy, was of the future. And he was confident of the future; even more confident than his mother; for every prophetic little Samuel hears the voice of God before it reaches the ears of the blind Eli, though he may not at first recognize the voice that calls him.

“Don’t worry, Albert dearest,” the mother sobbed, sunshine through her tears, “the war will soon be over, business will improve, and you will not be handicapped for want of money.”

* * * * *

Late that afternoon, in the dimmest twilight, she locked the shop on Schmallgasse, walked down the narrow street, and turned into the Marktplatz, an air of stealth in her movements. Frequently she glanced this way and that, like a hunted criminal, and hugged a little packet to her breast. When she reached Ludwig Grimm’s pawnshop she halted, hesitated a moment, took a step backwards, halted again, and then, with a sudden lurch forward, darted up the three stone steps that led to Grimm’s and opened the door with a resolute jerk. . . . .

THE LORELEI.

I.

Nearly four years had passed in the life of the dreamy youth. They had been turbulent, epoch-making years, years full of anguish and unabated fear. Napoleon’s armies had swept South as far as the Mediterranean and beyond, had also pushed their way East as far as the ancient capital of Russia, the whole world breathlessly awaiting the ultimate fate of the conqueror. For mingled with the fear of the invader was the conviction that no matter how heroic, he must meet with defeat in the end. When would the end come? The vanquished nations had hoped against hope, but finally beheld a sign from Heaven in the devouring flames of Moscow. A lull followed, the lull before an impeding storm. Spring had arrived, and with it came the nervous tension of prolonged suspense. Foreboding was in the air. The very elements foretold a terrific struggle. Westphalia and all of northern Germany was visited by devastating storms. On clear nights the superstitious saw in the heavens blood-red stars in the shape of besoms with long handles—the unerring omen of bloody battles! Everybody was certain that a gripping conflict between God and the devil was at hand, but no one knew on which side was God and on which the devil.

But what did it all matter to Albert Zorn? Nero fiddled while Rome was burning; Goethe rhymed sweet lyrics and made love to Christiane Vulpius while the enemy was at the gates of Weimar; on the very day that the Battle of Jena was fought, Schlegel, the savant of Jena, unconcernedly dispatched a manuscript to his publisher.

Albert was only thinking of his hero, the Emperor. Tears were in the boy’s eyes as he listened to the reports of the Emperor’s flight from the Russian steppes, mortification in his soul as he looked upon the foot-weary, wan, hollow-eyed, bedraggled forms of the straggling grenadiers, making their way home from the snowfields of Smolensk. However, even the stirring news of lost battles, the flying rumors of approaching clashes, the roar of death-dealing cannon, were to him mere tales of adventure romantically told. Spring had come, the sun was shining brilliantly, perfume was in the air, flowers were unfolding treasures of gold and silver and dazzling rubies, the buds were revealing depositories of emerald and opal and ermine, the nightingales were singing of love and passion and death—adolescence’s holy trinity—and the banks of the Rhine were re-echoing the mystic legends of bygone days.

He had even failed to note the difference between his father’s brown coat with a sheen of genteel shabbiness and his own clothes of good quality and latest mode, and the disparity between his mother’s frocks, antedating the French occupation, and those of his sister in the fashion of the day.

His mind was occupied with other thoughts. He was aloof and alone. He never had many friends but always had at least one devoted comrade, who accompanied him on his rambles through the woods on the outskirts of the city or lay with him outstretched on the grassy bank of the Rhine and listened to his exuberant speeches. Christian Lutz was still his trusted friend. Christian was to Albert what Jonathan was to that poetical shepherd boy, David. Perhaps the Psalmist’s love for the son of King Saul was likewise strengthened by the latter’s willingness to listen. Albert poured into Christian’s ears all his secret hopes and tormenting despair. Not infrequently the hopes and despair came almost at once. In the midst of an outpouring of his poetic fervor despair would seize him. One day he read a glowing account of Byron in a German periodical. The author of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” was only in the early twenties and he, Albert, was already sixteen and had done nothing! Consumed with burning envy he tossed on the grass in utter misery, tears rolling down his pale cheeks. He called himself a vain coxcomb, a braggart without a spark of talent. But presently his loyal friend began to contradict his self-accusations. Christian reminded him of the drama in verse he was planning, and after all one was not so very old at sixteen. Albert remained quiet for a space, listening to his friend’s comforting, pulling blades of grass by the roots and absently tearing them into tiny bits. And finally he burst out impetuously, “I know, Christian, I know I’ll be a great poet—I’ll write better than Wilhelm Müller, better than—.” Becoming conscious of his boasting he checked himself and, producing a few sheets from his breast pocket, began to read the verses he had penned the evening before. And Christian was such an encouraging listener! His enthusiasm was boundless. “Albert, these verses are as beautiful as any of Uhland’s!” he exclaimed.

Albert blushed scarlet. He had thought that himself but dared not utter such blasphemy. For to Albert at this stage of his life, Uhland was the highest of all high. It was as if some second rate god of antiquity boasted of a mightiness surpassing that of Zeus.

In moods like these he would steal out of the house, his visored cap over his eyes, and wander aimlessly through the maze of crooked, narrow streets, driven by irresistible impulses, until he would find himself on the bank of his beloved river. Here there were a thousand objects to dissipate his gloom. The gently flowing stream, the floating boats, the changing tints of the sky, the little wildflowers turning their pretty faces up to him like coquettish young maidens. And the ruins of the castle on the bank of the Rhine abounded in mystery. He often paused, pensively listening to the moaning and sighing of the wind-driven waves against those ruins with a secret awe creeping into his being. Was that the rustling of her silk dress—the dress of the “headless princess”, of whom his nurse had told him in his childhood? But the headless princess only came out of the ruins on moonlight nights! Perhaps they were the stealthy footsteps of the fair young shepherd, looking longingly at the battlements in hope of catching a glimpse of his beloved princess!

His eyes opened, and circles seemed to go round and round—circles of fanciful colors like those he had often seen when pressing his eyes against his pillows—and there was a strange surging in his blood, tumult in his head. His heart filled with a thousand longings, a thousand yearnings, yearnings and longings indefinite, inarticulate. He was only conscious of an aching restlessness, of an irritating strife within him . . .

Throwing himself upon the grassy bank, he would lie listlessly for a time, blankly staring at the sky, only half-conscious of chirping birds around him. Gradually, slowly, strands of thought would begin to come—desultory, fugitive, disconnected fibres of thought, like flying gossamer.

Sometimes other ambitions stirred his being. His mother had often spoken of a military career for him. His mind would skip to Napoleon, the hero he had worshipped ever since he could remember. He would see himself in the role of a warrior, mounted upon a spirited little white horse, as he had once seen Napoleon. His vivid imagination would behold the battlefields, littered with bleeding men and horses, the cry of agony in his ears . . .

No, no, not that! He could not bear the sight of blood, the shriek of pain. He could not be a great warrior.

Again his fancy drifted. He recalled “The Life and Adventures of the Ingenious Knight, Don Quixote de la Mancha,” which he had read and reread with such delight. He would like to be a warrior without being obliged to shed blood, a hero like Don Quixote. Presently the stories of Quixote became fused with those he had heard of his great-uncle, Nathan Hollmann, of whose travels and adventures his aunts had told him so many grotesque tales and whose writings he had discovered in a dusty chest in his grandfather’s attic. Like his great-uncle he would also be dressed in an Asiatic costume and smoke a long Turkish pipe and speak Arabic and travel all over “the seven seas” and through Morocco and Spain and the deserts of Egypt and make a pilgrimage to the Holy City and perhaps, like him, see a vision on Mount Moriah! From the fantastic image of his great-uncle to a Sheik of the Bedouins was but a step. He visualized himself traveling with long trains of caravans and robber bands, scouring the dense forests of Arabia for victims (when Albert’s imagination took flight it disregarded geography). The notion of a robber chief appealed to him. The romantic scenes from “Die Räuber” haunted him. Of course, he would not really rob people—he could not think of taking anything away from anybody—but he would lead the robber bands through the immense woods and—and in chorus—sing beautiful songs, the echoes resounding through hill and dale . . .

Lying thus, his fancy at large, the arabesque tales about his great-uncle eventually merged into those of the knight errant. Cervantes and Don Quixote and his great-uncle became one and the same person, and he himself, for the moment, was the reincarnation of them all. He wished he could go away—far, far away—to Morocco, to Turkey, to the “dense forests” of Arabia, and perchance be thrown into an underground dungeon, penetrated only by the stray rays of the sun, mildew smells everywhere, with clanking chains and great keys turning in rusty locks, with big fat mice—beautiful, snow-white mice—darting back and forth, the turbulent waters of a surrounding moat lapping against the prison walls darkened with age. His imaginary confinement in the dungeon, however, did not interfere with his adventurous travels. His imprisonment was simultaneous with his roving with caravans of camels and donkeys and dromedaries, and elephants whose tusks glistened in the blazing sun of the Orient . . .

II.

His constant day-dreaming and the feeding of his imagination on poetry and romance cost Albert much misery at the end of every semester. He invariably failed in all studies except literature and philosophy.

On his arrival home one afternoon he found Father Schumacher engaged in a serious conversation with his mother. Father Schumacher was a picturesque figure, prematurely gray with a fine head set upon broad shoulders and a pair of brown eyes that twinkled mirthfully. There was something in his shrewd eyes that seemed to say, “I know all the meanness and frailties of human nature, I know this earthly planet is no paradise, but we are here and must make the best of it.” He was loved by all regardless of creed. After the French had conquered the city and reopened the Lyceum, he was named rector. The new ruler knew that Father Schumacher could be trusted in spite of his German allegiance. He was very learned and familiar with all the philosophies—from Socrates to Kant—which he taught at the Lyceum without, however, interfering with his loyalty to Rome.

The friendship between the former priest and Bessie Zorn ran back to the time she was a little girl, when he was a classmate of her brother, Joseph, and was almost a daily visitor at her father’s home. Since her father’s death and her marriage to David, Father Schumacher was a frequent visitor at the Zorn home, and of late Albert had been an added attraction. The rector was very fond of the boy and often gave the mother encouragement when her enthusiasm waned.

Albert was about to enter the living-room, where his mother and the visitor were seated, when he overheard his mother saying, “Indeed, he is quite a problem. If I could only keep him away from poetry and French novels I could knock his poetic nonsense out of his head.”

“I’ve let him attend my class in philosophy,” the rector struck in. “Perhaps that will put some reason into his head.”

“Yes, that might turn him into a Kantian,” laughed the mother, “and I don’t know which is worse, a befogged Kantian or a beggarly rhymester.” After the briefest pause she added, “I am going to get him a special tutor for mathematics. He doesn’t seem to grasp any scientific subject—I’d like him to study banking.”

“You’ll never make a banker of that boy,” he replied. “He isn’t cut out for a mercantile career and you’ll but waste your efforts. Why don’t you give him to the Church? I might be able to be of good service to you in that direction. I know quite a few dignitaries in Rome.”

“I don’t think a priest’s robe would be becoming to Albert’s style of beauty,” she said laughingly.

“Ah, you haven’t seen how chic the abbes in Rome wear their garb,” he returned in a tone of levity.

“No, I am afraid this is out of the question.”

“It’s better to give him to Rome than to Greece,” the former priest pressed his point symbolically. “It was the Church that saved the Italian masters from idolatry. Don’t you think it would have been far better for Voltaire, and mankind, if he had been won by the Church? I know Albert, he needs the Church. He might carve for himself a glorious career in Rome!”

“Personally I’d have him anything rather than a rhymester,” the mother burst out passionately, without concealing her horror at such a prospect.

“But with the present unrest what else is left for a gifted young man?” proceeded the Jesuit. Then he added in a lower voice, “One day we are Prussian, the next French, and we may be Russian some day, God only knows. And while you know how free I am from prejudice, the boy’s faith will be in his way. I hear that the Jews in Berlin have almost exhausted the holy water of the baptismal font there.” He laughed indulgently as he referred to the great number of conversions in the Prussian capital.

“No one knows better than you,” she presently said, “that you can’t make a good Christian of a good Jew. The most you can do is to turn a bad Jew into a worse Christian.”

They both laughed amicably.

“Honestly, I don’t believe Albert has a religious sense,” she added a moment later. “Nothing is too sacred for him to make fun of.”

“That’s only the boy’s sense of humor,” he contradicted her. “He has more religion than you think. Sentiments of any kind are impossible without a religious sense, and Albert is full of sentiment—”

Albert’s entrance interrupted further conversation. Bowing, he walked up to Father Schumacher and kissed his extended soft white hand.

The rector’s eyes now rested upon the boy’s face with renewed interest. He was still thinking of his suggestion to the mother. Albert’s narrowed eyes registered acute sensitiveness. The mother’s eyes also fell upon her son as if she, too, had noticed the peculiar expression on his countenance for the first time.

“What a pity he was not born a Catholic,” muttered the former priest as Albert bowed out of the room.

When the rector was gone the mother took her son in hand. She did not scold him—she never scolded him—she only tried to reason with him.

“Albert, dearest, what will become of you?” she pleaded.

He said nothing. He stood like an accused at the bar of justice, guilt in his heart.

“How can you ever amount to anything unless you pass your examinations—especially in mathematics?” she proceeded.

The unshed tears in the mother’s eyes overflowed. His eyes, too, began to fill. He was not grieved because he had failed in mathematics but it pained him to have his mother worried. He was silent. He had no words of justification. Soon his chin began to quiver, his lips to twitch, and his eyelashes trembled.

“Father’s business is going from bad to worse,” she resumed in a kind, though plaintive, tone, “and what can one do without money? Everybody thinks we are well-to-do, but we have hardly anything. If it weren’t for Uncle Leopold we would have been on the point of starvation long before this.”

Still not a word from Albert. Only hot tears burned his tender eyelids.

Suddenly, without a word, he flung his arms around his mother and kissed her tear-stained cheeks. Indeed, henceforth he would apply himself to mathematics and would study hard, day and night.

But before long he had again fallen from grace, despite his steadfast efforts to please his mother. This realization did not dawn upon him until toward the close of the following term. With a heart filled with contrition he reviewed the past. Alas! he had spent most of his time on poetry and novels and mythology but had scarcely given more than fleeting glances to his other studies.

Conscious of guilt he sought to justify himself to himself. With such an indulgent audience he had no difficulty in purging himself of all wrong. What difference did it really make to him whether _a_ plus _b_ equaled _x_ or sixteen? What was it to him that the sum of the interior angles of a polygon equaled two right angles, taken as many times, less two, as the figures had sides? Of what concern to him was the expedition of Cyrus the Younger against his brother Artaxerxes thousands of years ago when a greater expedition of a greater hero had so recently ended disastrously! Why tax his brain with the Greek aorist and the Latin grammar and the stilted speeches of Clearches? Ah, if he could only become a great man without being compelled to learn these things!

But his mother had impressed upon him again and again that the road to greatness lay through a labyrinth of angles and equations and logarithms, with impediments consisting of irregular verbs of decayed Romans, of dead Greeks, and of Hebrews who would not die!

III.

Sex, however, had not yet played a definite part in his existence. Once when declaiming “Der Taucher” at a school celebration his roving eye caught sight of the pretty daughter of a well known official in the audience and he was so affected by her beauty that speech left him. The teacher, back on the speaker’s platform, endeavored to prompt him, thinking he had forgotten the lines, but to no purpose. Albert’s eyes were riveted upon that beautiful vision and he could not proceed. Now and then he had received other jolts of passion—the convulsive jolts of adolescence—but he had brooded over them for short periods, cherished them for a while, and finally dismissed them from his mind.

Thus several years had passed full of intermittent flitting fancies, emotions that were meaningless to him.

One day a sudden change took place in him. Something had happened that was fixed in his mind. He was conscious of sentiments and feelings that were of the same nature that he had experienced before and yet were different. Prior to this he could not define the strange longings of his being, now they spoke to him in unmistakable terms; the voice was tumultuous; he could not shut it out.

He was passing the Witch’s hut, which stood at the end of the town, close by the Rhine. No one called her by her real name, Graettel, but only by the name of the Witch. She gave potions to lovelorn maidens and exorcised evil spirits from unclean bodies.

He suddenly stopped. For a bare second he imagined a mermaid had leaped to the shore. Surely no mermaid had finer golden hair shimmering with iridescent colors!

Filled with a sense of mystery, strangely mingled with slumbering memories of the past, he took a step nearer the straw-thatched hovel but at the sound of his footsteps the skein of golden hair was lifted as if by an invisible hand and presently he beheld a pair of great dark eyes peering at him. Again he thought it an optic illusion, but the sweet murmurs of the Rhine were in his ears, a thousand legends of the ruins of castles in his brain, the mermaids of folklore in his memory; a forest singer was balancing himself on a bough of the large elm in front of the hut, singing a melody of his own. Then a peal of laughter—the musical laughter of a sweet girlish voice—and the apparition vanished.

Albert was breathing fast, his whole frame aquiver. The next moment he took a step forward and remained standing at the open door. A glance within revealed no change since he had visited here with his nurse in his childhood, and there was but little change without.

He stood at the threshold and peered inside with increased curiosity, seeing no one. It seemed empty save for an unpainted table and a few backless chairs—the same as of old.

A warbling song—a folksong he used to hear in his childhood—reached his ears. It was sung in a minor key, and that in suppressed tones. Soon the melody ceased and the great dark eyes peeped out of the opening of a partition, the body hidden from view.

“Hedwiga!” he cried and stepped inside.

A barefooted girl emerged, her head bent sideways, running a comb through her long reddish golden tresses. She continued combing her hair unconcernedly, a bewitching smile in her eyes.

“Hedwiga, how you have grown!” Albert cried gleefully, staring at her tall, slender form, her thin skirt clinging to her legs “like the wet drapery of a statue.”

Gathering her golden mane in her left hand she tossed it back and, pulling a hair pin from between her lips, fastened it close to the roots, the ends hanging loosely down over her shoulders.

“You have grown, too,” she presently said, looking at him with her large candid eyes. Then she added, “I am already sixteen, going on seventeen.”

“So am I sixteen,” he caught his breath, thrilled at the thought of being the same age as she. “Do you remember me?”

“You are Zippel’s boy (Zippel had been his nurse)—of course, I remember you. Don’t you remember how we used to play in the yard while Aunt Graettel and Zippel talked and talked and talked—”

“And do you remember how we used to play ‘Lost in the woods’?” he reminded her, “and Zippel and your Aunt couldn’t find us, and we lay hidden under the old broken boat, laughing and watching your Aunt and Zippel through the cracks as they ran around and wrung their hands?”

They both laughed merrily. At every stage of life the preceding stage is childhood, reminiscent of things to laugh at.

“Where have you been?” he soon asked her, settling down astride a backless chair.

“With my grandfather near Freiburg—we lived near the Schwarzwald—but he died and then grandma died and then I had nobody but Aunt Graettel—she is my great-aunt—and she brought me here.”

She heaved a sigh, sadness coming over her face.

“Why didn’t you go to your mother?” he asked naively.

“I have no mother—I have no father either—they had died before I was two—my father was killed by the thieves.—”

She was finishing her toilet as she spoke, having donned a flaming red blouse, and halted for a moment absently, staring blankly in front of her.

“Was your father a headman, too?”

She nodded, the sadness of her face deepening, and catching her breath she said, “My father was a headman and his father and my grandfather’s father, also my mother’s father. Aunt Graettel is my grandfather’s sister.”

Albert gave an involuntary shudder. Zippel had told him so many gruesome tales about headmen. They were all cursed and must cut off men’s heads whether they wanted to or not. Nobody associated with headmen or their children and, like a race apart, lived isolated and intermarried only among themselves.

“Are you going to be here long?” he asked.

She was hooking her blouse, which fastened on the side, and her eyes were downcast, following her nimble fingers.

“I have no other place to go to,” she presently replied. “And I am glad my grandma died so I could come here.”

Albert again shuddered. He was not glad his grandmother had died.

“Did she beat you?”

“No, she didn’t beat me—I wouldn’t let anyone beat me—.” She turned her eyes fiercely upon him as if he had threatened her. “But it was with, those three old hags at their distaffs, drinking and quarreling all the time—from morning till night—oh, I am glad they are all dead!”

“Your Aunt Graettel is good to you, isn’t she?” Albert’s voice was sympathetic. He was glad Hedwiga was no more with those drinking witches.

“She is very good to me. She is usually in town all day, and when she gets back she always brings me something nice. And I sit on the bank, down the slope, and watch the skiffs go by, and when nobody is around I go swimming on the edge of the river—.”

Albert held his breath. In his imagination he followed her down the slope and watched the skiffs go by and went swimming with her. He raised his eyes to her and blushed scarlet. A flitting thought had sent a quiver through his frame. She was now seated on a stool close to him. He had become conscious of her bare feet and of her white throat and slender shoulders. He wished to say something but his mouth was dry and his throat was parched. He was swallowing lumps.

Hedwiga glanced at him and, as if divining his thoughts, also blushed. To hide her passing thought she emitted a little laugh.

They were both silent for a moment and self-conscious. Then he raised his eyes and stared at her boldly. She gave him a quick glance and began to laugh again. Rising from his chair he wished to stretch out his hand and touch her face—the tip of her slightly upturned nose and the curving red of her lips.

He was soon standing at the door, going yet wishing he could stay. She, too, was standing, her head a trifle inclined to one side.

“How tall you are!” he stammered.

This was not what he wished to say, but he mentally scanned her from head to foot and the words leaped to his lips uninvited.

“I am not much taller than you,” she said.

And stepping up close to him she placed her shoulder against his.

What was it he felt at the contact with her shoulder? He recalled the sensation again and again on his way home. It was as if the smooth little hand of a babe were passing and repassing that spot; he experienced a sensation of yielding to caresses; and yet this very sensuousness had made him speechless. It occurred to him later that he had not bidden her goodbye as they parted.

IV.

Albert’s mind was like a sponge thrown into water, absorbing while seemingly inactive. Subconsciously he was studying every face, no matter how often he had seen it; every object, however commonplace, aroused his curiosity.

When he left Hedwiga his mind was a blank. He walked on blindly, seemingly thoughtful but really thinking of nothing. He was conscious of joy tempered by timidity—but without thinking of anything in particular.

Nearing his home he began to think of her more specifically. She was a living image. The image grew in vividness. His eyes almost closed now—his eyelids had come together automatically—and all objects disappeared save her form. Her slender figure and that clinging, draping skirt around her legs; her loose hair of dazzling tints—red and gold mixed with ochre—and those wonderful eyes of her—they looked at him so piteously and yet so proudly. He was breathing fast, a warm glow was on his face, his full lips parted. For the moment his mouth seemed strikingly feminine—the mouth of a young woman alive to stirring passion.

No, he was not conscious of sex; at least, not of the sex-consciousness he had often experienced. Its rude call was absent. He could not define the difference, but the strange desires he had felt at the sight of the barefooted peasant girls working in the fields were wanting. All that he desired at present was to go back to that hut—to the home of the Witch so full of dread and mystery—and just sit and look at Hedwiga.

He told no one of his visit to the Free House, as the Witch’s hovel was called. He did not even make mention of this to his sister, the keeper of all his secrets, nor even to Christian, but he thought of Hedwiga every minute.

After much day-dreaming Albert took a stroll in the direction of the Witch’s house. He had not yet definitely decided to pay her another call, but was sauntering aimlessly on the road leading to the Witch’s house. Before long he found himself perilously near the hut. He first caught sight of the elm tree. It was the same hour of the day he had chanced by the first time. Without the calculation of the maturer lover he vaguely hoped that he would again find her alone—perhaps again drying her hair in the sun. His heart beat loudly as he approached the little yard, covered with weeds and grass. The blistered front door was shut.

He mounted the steps and paused on the slab at the threshold, trembling. It was a hot afternoon, without a sound in the air. The old elm tree with the overhanging branches and parched leaves seemed like an old horse left standing unsheltered in the blazing sun. The Rhine flowed noiselessly on, with broad folds of gray reflecting the patches of cloud in the sky.

He felt certain that no one was in the hut, yet he knocked on the door boldly. It gave him pleasure to knock on that door. Every rap sounded in his ears as if he were voicing Hedwiga’s name loudly.

Suddenly the door opened and fear seized him. He did not know why sudden fear had taken possession of him. Before him stood Hedwiga in the same clinging skirt, ragged at the hem, the same flaming red blouse reaching to her waist, her hair falling over her shoulders in long tresses. She appeared to him like the West Indian quadroon he had once seen. He forgot to greet her and only mumbled that it was a hot day.

She held the door open without saying a word. Unlike at their former meeting she now seemed confused and her confusion was mingled with timidity. The scorching heat was reflected in the iris of her eyes.

Without invitation he went in and sat down in the same backless chair.

“I keep the door closed because that keeps the heat out of the house,” she said as she closed the door.

He was conscious of isolation, of aloneness with her. She was knitting, and settling on her stool she continued to work, her eyes downcast.

“Why do you knit such heavy woolen stockings in the summer?” he asked, watching the nimble movements of her long fingers, the frequent jerks of her elbows, and the intermittent clicks of the needles.

“Why do squirrels store nuts in the summer?” she answered with a counterquestion, and gave a little metallic laugh.

Suddenly she raised her eyes and looked at him for a bare second, her lashes quivering, a faint blush on her cheeks.

He held his breath. The impulse he had felt the first time—the impulse to touch the tip of her nose and the curving red of her lips—came upon him overwhelmingly; her knees, outlined through her thin skirt, tempted him. His eyes soon fell upon the hook where the skirt was fastened at the waist. An impulse seized him to touch that, too. There seemed something endearing about that hook.

He spent an awkward hour and called himself an idiot as he wended his way home that afternoon. She was kindly enough to have manifested a desire to have him stay longer, but he had suddenly risen and left.

As soon as he was out of the hut he wished to go back, and wondered what had made him depart so abruptly, yet even as he wondered he pressed on resolutely toward home.

“I thought your eyes were blue, but they are only green,” she had remarked. A few minutes before she had said something about the smallness of his eyes and the frailty of his body. He thought there was a touch of mockery in her voice as she said that. And the idea of asking him whether he liked songs!

He did not pity her any longer. On the former occasion she had appeared humble, almost obsequious; today he scented pride. On his return home he determined to dismiss her from his mind.

V.

He might have dismissed Hedwiga from his mind had not a kindhearted gossip carried the report of his visit to his parents. Father and Mother held council. They had not been much concerned about their son’s religious belief, but the mother’s eye was ever vigilant as to his morals.

“You had better talk to him,” David Zorn said. “He must stop these visits. You can never tell what they might lead to at his tender age.”

Mrs. Zorn spent a troublesome night over this. She was alarmed but she did not wish to seem too antagonistic. She knew the effect of antagonism upon her impetuous, high-strung son. So she broached the subject with seeming levity, with playfulness almost.

“But you know, Albert dear, a headman’s daughter is no company for Doctor Hollman’s grandson,” she urged persuasively.

“The girl isn’t to blame because her father was a headman,” he returned. “Why should she bear the sins of her fathers?”

The longer his mother argued the more reasons he found against her arguments. It was unjust to make the poor girl an outcast because her father had been an executioner, he insisted.

When he left his mother his heart was full of pity for the poor outcast. He brooded over her unfortunate position. He could not dismiss her image from his mind—the slender frame draped by that clinging skirt! His imagination lent color to the misery of the child of the accursed. He visualized her past. He saw her in the Black Forest surrounded by those old, toothless hags, drinking and quarreling and whirring their spinning wheels. He saw her ragged garments, her little bare feet curled under her, her unkempt golden hair, her beautiful eyes. The picture of her as a child was blended with that of the present day Hedwiga.

In his cogitation he soon found himself fighting for a principle. He did not listen to the throbbing of his boyish heart, to the seething of the blood of youth, which were propelling him toward the Free House with a power of their own. He persuaded himself that it was his keen sense of justice that forced him to defy his mother’s wishes.

It was summer time, the thrushes were singing, the roses were in bloom, the call of flocks was heard over plain and meadow, the sunlight rested on hill and dale; it way summer and the morning dew of love was on Albert’s cheeks.

He called at the Witch’s again and again; and the more often he came the more natural it seemed to be with her. The constraint had soon worn off and they were children again—boy and girl. When Aunt Graettel was at home he talked to her, and she told him many weird tales of her husband and his coterie of headmen.

“That sword cut off more than a hundred heads,” she pointed to a large, shining sabre standing in a corner.

Albert shuddered at the sight of the bloody weapon.

“My husband could always tell beforehand when he would be called upon to perform his work,” the Witch added proudly. “When the sword quivered and emitted a strange sound my husband knew some thief’s head was to come off.”

But most of the time he found Hedwiga alone and he soon discovered that she could sing beautiful songs of loving knights and beloved princesses and shepherds on the hills.

While the cannons were roaring at Waterloo and crushing the armies of the Emperor he worshipped, Albert Zorn was seated in the little hut on the Rhine, listening to Hedwiga’s melodies; and intoxicated with love rushed to translate his sentiments into sweet rhymes.

Thus the summer passed, and winter came. He had left the Lyceum and was now attending the Realschule. His mother was steadfast in her resolution to make a banker of him. She saw great possibilities in the financial world as soon as the terms of peace were definitely settled. For Napoleon had already been decisively beaten and the rulers of the other nations were holding a momentous conference.

One afternoon he found Hedwiga in a strange mood. It was midwinter, the river asleep under blankets of the softest down, the long arms of the large elm tree covered with the whitest fleece, and inside the hut the cozy, stuffy warmth of a low ceiling, crackling logs in an open oven and flames wrapped in dense smoke, rolling into the flue with a roaring glare. Hedwiga was seated opposite the fire, her left elbow on her knee, her chin in the open palm of her hand, her cheeks and eyes aglow, warbling a weird song.

Albert was silent. He had had a strange dream about her the night before and her present preoccupation reminded him of the dream. He thought he had seen her before in precisely the same environments and in the same pose. His imagination often played him pranks of this sort.

With eyes narrowed, he watched the light in her eyes, the contour of her cheeks, the shadowy white of her throat and the slight movement of her breasts. Yes, he knew the song she was humming. Zippel used to sing it to him in his childhood.

Hedwiga’s eyes closed and her red lips trembled. Then silence; no sound save that of the roaring fire.

“_Ich will küssen_—” he chimed in, finishing the stanza.

He paused and looked yearningly at her red lips, which were slightly parted against the dazzling white of her teeth.

Hedwiga opened her great dark eyes, turned them upon him teasingly, and suddenly jumped up from her low seat; and dashing across the room seized the shining sword—the sword that had cut off a hundred heads—and brandishing it in the air whirled around and sang again of the Great Otilje and his shining sword, pointing the deadly weapon at his breast every time she faced him.

“Hedwiga!”

But her wild song drowned his whispered murmurs. There was provoking defiance in her roguish eyes, almost a trace of malevolence in her face as she came close to him, barely touching him, and then swung away in her mad dance with the glittering blade.

“Hedwiga!”

But she would not pause. She continued whirling around and warbling this odd song. Once or twice he tried to seize her as she brushed past him, but she gracefully evaded him. He finally leaped from his seat and flung his arms around her.

“Don’t—take care!—” she cried, panting, holding the sword in front of her.

But he clung to her recklessly and, the sword having dropped from her hand, pressed his lips against her feverish mouth.

She turned her head this way and that to escape his kisses, gurgling laughter in her throat, but was overpowered by his impetuosity, gradually yielding, listlessly turning her face to his, her parted burning lips seeking his . . .

Entwined they sat, the fire of their beings leaping into a common flame. Soon tears overflowed her eyes—she did not know why she was crying but in her heart was dread mingled with inexpressible joy—and presently his tears streamed down his pale cheeks.

A strand of her hair loosened and touched his face. He begged for this lock of hair. He swore he would carry it to his dying day—“Yes, to my dying day,” he repeated again and again.

A new light appeared in her eyes, and suddenly freeing herself she cut the golden lock with the fallen blade.

He took it from her and kissed it tenderly and murmured reverently, “Until the last beat of my heart—.”

VI.

He left her that day with a feeling that this was all a dream, a bewitching dream. When he returned home he flung his arms around his sister and laughed and cried and uttered a babble of foolish words. He muttered rhythmic verses that sprang to his lips. At last he understood love. He had made the great discovery.

His sister shared his ecstasy without knowing the cause. She knew Albert was sentimental. She had often seen him act madly when reciting his songs to her. This was her secret. That her brother had other secrets was unknown to her.

Having exhausted the exuberance of his feelings upon his sister he rushed out of the house in quest of Christian Lutz. He felt that with Christian he could talk more freely.

He did not tell Christian at once of Hedwiga but talked of love and death. He was just raving as Christian had often heard him rave about flowers and the Rhine. He recited a ballad he had composed about an imaginary maiden with golden locks and lips as red as rubies and a face as blessedly sweet as the lily and the roses. He knew Hedwiga’s hair was red, and only golden when the sun rested upon it, but he would not think of red hair—it was always golden. Besides, it did not sound so well—“_Ihr rotes Haar_”—No, it would not do; it would not ring as well as “_Ihr goldenes Haar_”. Besides, the only color that was really beautiful was golden; and the ever docile, acquiescing Christian concurred in this. A short time before, when Albert discussed a Spanish Donna, who was to figure in his great tragedy, and had gone into raptures about the lustre of bluish-black hair, Christian had just as readily, and whole-heartedly, admitted that raven hair was the most beautiful in the world.

While Albert did not at first mention the name of his beloved, he talked so much of golden hair, of a small mouth with red curving lips, of a slender figure and clinging garments, of features more nobly chiseled than those of Niobe’s daughters, of a certain hut on the bank of the Rhine—the quaintest hut in the world—of innocent children who must suffer for their father’s sins, and of a thousand other things that Christian could not help but recognize the identity of the goddess his friend was worshipping; and when finally, in a moment of great secrecy, Albert whispered her lovely name—the loveliest name in creation and the most melodious—Christian feigned such great surprise that Albert felt flattered at the word picture he had given of her.

Mrs. Zorn had been watching the progress of her son’s infatuation with anxious, yet amused, vigilance. She had always regarded romanticism as mere froth, easily dissipated by the strong currents of reason. When her husband told her again and again of the repeated rumors that had reached him she only smiled. What was the calf-love of a youth of sixteen? Besides, though she had drifted from the creed of her forefathers, the centuries of segregation, the self-discipline, the enforced chastity of her people had not only subdued but almost eradicated the romantic instinct from her heart. The Ghetto had eaten itself into the very flesh of the Jewish woman of those days and seared her passions. Hemmed in as if a cordon had been thrown around her, all self-expression denied, her intense romantic love, like a rushing current dammed on one side, turned into another course and spent itself on filial devotion, conjugal affection, domestic tenderness. Persecution, like the fire that purifies gold and also brings forth dross, often ennobles the soul even while it degrades the body.

Towards the end of that winter, however, Mrs. Zorn began to realize that something had to be done to end her son’s foolish infatuation. Albert was neglecting his studies more than ever and had become more subject to nervous headaches, walked too much, brooded too much, and took to reading poetry more assiduously. She began to fear her dream of making a banker of him might not be realized. Her husband had suggested that he be apprenticed to a banker in Frankfort, a friend of his.

The next day she broached the subject rather abruptly. She meant to impress upon Albert the folly of his ways.

“Albert, I have something of the gravest importance to say to you.”

She paused. She wished to prepare him for the solemn occasion. There was no one in the house. She had purposely timed the interview so that she could speak to him alone.

“What is it, mother?”

“I hate to speak of it, but I wonder if you appreciate at what sacrifice your father has kept you at school—“. Whenever she wished to impress him she always spoke of his father, never of herself. “He has denied you nothing—has given you a good home, good clothes—while he denied himself almost everything.”

She turned her eyes away. Albert drooped his head, tears appearing in his eyes. Her evident sorrow pained him.

“I’ll be glad to quit school and go to work,” he said promptly. “I don’t want to be a burden to you.”

“No, you don’t understand me, Albert. No good parents ever find their children burdensome. These burdens are pleasures—. I wouldn’t speak of this if you—if you—”

She faltered. She could not find fitting words to clothe her present thoughts. She wished to reprimand him without hurting his feelings.

He threw his arms around his mother’s neck, hot tears streaming down his cheeks.

“I’ll go to work, mother dear—I’ll learn a trade—I’ll do anything to lighten your burdens.” He kissed her hysterically.

“It’s not that. We don’t mind that in the least. The war is over and father will resume business. But we have decided to apprentice you to a banker in Frankfort. He is a good friend of father’s and will give you every opportunity of learning the business.”

She paused, slyly watching the expression on his face. She feared his temper—all the Zorns had such violent tempers!

“I should love to go to Frankfort,” he cried joyfully.

The mother heaved a sigh of relief.

VII.

The prospect of the journey to Frankfort filled Albert with boyish glee. He was not thinking of his career—he did not clearly think of anything—he was happy because of the prospective change in his life. He had often heard his father tell of his visits to that beautiful city—the “_Weltstadt_”, his father had called it—the city where kings were once crowned and where his king, the great Goethe, was born—of the wonderful Fair, of the Roemer, of the Zeil. Albert had never seen a large city and was restive with anticipation.

He was in high spirits. His mother had never seen him so animated, so boyishly happy. He romped and danced and sang like a joyous child. His excitement was so great that he could neither read nor write nor talk coherently. He paced up and down the house, rambled through the streets, restless with eagerness.

In the meanwhile the winter was drawing to a close. Hedwiga, alone in that overheated hovel, sat knitting and brooding and thinking of Albert. He was the first ray of sunshine in her desolate life. He had often spoken to her of things she did not understand but that made him even more alluring. Only at rare moments she caught flashes, like that of meeting clouds, and then darkness again. She had heard her aunt prattle about love which had always been meaningless to her. But Albert’s sweet amorous words she understood. When she looked at his half-closed eyes, at his dishevelled hair, at his sensitive lips, she became more restless—she often quivered—and craved his touch, and yet when his hands came in contact with her arms she trembled with shrinking fear—shrinking and yet yielding. After he had kissed her that afternoon, in the warm dusk of the hut, her fear was gone. She longed for his arrival, to be seized in his arms, to have his lips against hers. Even in his absence her lips quivered as she thought of him and her eyes closed. He had a peculiar way of placing the tips of his sensitive fingers upon her shoulders, barely touching them, as if he were fingering the strings of a violin, and gazing into her face pensively, almost mysteriously, and then letting his fingers glide over her thinly covered arms—sending a delicious shiver through her whole being—and slowly, creepingly, letting them slide until they reached her wrists, then her hands, then her moist fingers, which almost involuntarily, helplessly became entwined with his, her eyes staring blindly, upward, at his face. No one could whisper such sweet little secrets in her memory. The tears that often sprang to her eyes were never bitter; she felt happier when they came.

Her aunt had of late been alarmed about her. She seemed to have grown thinner, with a peculiar flush in her cheeks. When Aunt Graettel at first made some veiled reference to her health, she laughed merrily and said she had never felt as well as now. One day Aunt Graettel overheard a stifled cough and told her niece that it might be best to have that Zorn boy stop his visits and she forthwith prepared a concoction of herbs. Hedwiga shoved the tonic away with a fierceness the Witch had never suspected in her and said if Albert stopped coming she would throw herself into the river.

But Albert’s joy at the approach of his journey was so great that he failed to notice the peculiar lustre in the girl’s eyes. He was bubbling over with delight. Did she not think it was wonderful? He was going to the _Weltstadt_, where mere were theatres and picture galleries and a great library and cafés and grand boulevards and—and he stopped for want of words. Did she not think it was wonderful?

“And there are so many pretty girls in Frankfort?” she returned, with a sad smile and a strange glitter in her eyes.

No, he swore he was not thinking of girls. Besides, no one was as pretty as his Lorelei, his Hedwiga.

“You are not crying?”

He shrank back half a step and looked puzzled.

No, she was not crying. She wiped her tears away and was smiling. And presently he was reading a poem he had written the other night. He recited the verses—they were meant for her . . .

No, no, she did not wish to cry, but her tears flowed against her will. He stowed the verses away and was consoling her. Wouldn’t it be wonderful when he came back after he had seen the world! His arms were stealing around her, her lips yielded so willingly, her tears flowed so freely! Tears beget tears, and soon his emotions stirred. He did not know why, but his tears flowed, too, mingling with hers and, with heart beating against heart, the fires of youth blazed in one conflagration—_Dann schlagen zusammen die Flammen_!

She was soon sobbing as if her heart would break.

“Why do you cry?” he asked.

She did not know why she was sobbing. There was really no occasion for grief. Was he not going to Frankfort to see the world—the great, wonderful world?

“Just think, _liebste_! No more dry text books, no more mathematics, no more stupid lessons in accounting, no more school! Just think of freedom all day and all night, and I shall be able to read and read and read and walk and walk through the boulevards and write—Oh, Hedwiga!” He pressed her to his breast with frantic ecstasy. “I’ll write wonderful tragedies and songs and I will—”

Words failed to express all his hopes and plans and desires. He was dizzy from the flood of thoughts that rushed upon him.

She was sobbing no longer. Her hands limply in her lap, her tear-stained face composed, her shoulders relaxed and stooped forward, she stared blankly in front of her, looking without seeing, her great eyes wide open and full of heart-rending sadness.

“Will you write to me?”

“Will I write to you? As often as the post will carry my letters. I’ll tell you all about the wonderful things in Frankfort. By the way, father said the streets in Frankfort are lighted at night—light enough to read—rows of great lanterns in the streets! Wouldn’t you like to see Frankfort?”

A sob was her only reply.

“But you will come to Frankfort. I’ll be in the banking business there, and I will send for you, sweetheart mine.”

VIII.

Soon the winter was gone. Men and women came to the sun’s aid with hatchet and pick-axe, hacking and chopping and chipping the frozen mass, glittering diamonds flying in the air and catching the genial rays of the early spring sun. There was joy in every heart and even greater joy in Albert’s breast. As soon as all the ice was gone and the road dried his father was to take him to Frankfort. His heart thrilled at the sound of the running waters, washing away the last traces of the hoary winter. He helped clear away the ice in the shadowy part of the yard which the sunbeams could not reach. He desired to hasten the arrival of spring, the day on which he could start on the great journey.

On the evening before his departure he and Christian took their last stroll. It was early in the evening, a young moon in the sky, the scents of spring in the air, from afar the rumbling sound of the awakening Rhine, and the gurgling of running waters. Two shadows, so clearly outlined on the ground, preceded them like bodyguards; one was taller than the other. The streets were dark save for the moonlight and the occasional glimmer from a window.

Albert’s voice, like the running waters, never ceased. He was talking of Frankfort, of his journey, of his future. While he knew he was to be apprenticed to a banker, the duties of such apprenticeship were not clear in his mind. He made the duties fit his dreams.

They had now reached the river, which had spread, as it always did at this time of the year, and had risen higher, and was flowing with increased speed. There was a glow like a milky-way along the midstream where the moonbeams rested lightly upon the rippling waters.

Albert halted his speech and his step. The river claimed his attention. He was not far from the cloister where the stream chattered noisily among the rocks and purred like a cat further down where there was a very narrow, low waterfall, descending like a huge corkscrew. For the moment Albert forgot everything, even Frankfort. The vast shadow of the Franciscan monastery, the moonlight above it, the rushing river, the earth-and-water scent in the air—they all overwhelmed him. It all found expression in a contraction of his eyelids and in an exultant cry of “Ah! Christian!”

His husky cry echoed in Christian’s heart. Albert was going far, far away—Frankfort seemed to Christian at an endless distance and the memories of their close friendship crowded in upon him. His association with Albert had made the boyish years so wonderful. Hardly a day but he had walked and talked with Albert, and listened to his strange chatter; and when they were alone Albert was full of mirth and pranks and laughter. Albert had such a peculiar way of making fun of people. And every book he read he discussed with Christian, though at times Christian could scarcely follow his comrade.

“Ah, Albert!” he echoed and rested his hand upon his friend’s arm.

There were tears in Christian’s eyes.

They remained standing silently for a moment, silhouetted in the moonlight against the vast shadow of the cloister. Then with a simultaneous impulse they were clasped in each other’s arms.

“Will you remember me when you become a great man?”

“Ah! Christian! Can I ever forget you!”

“Albert!”

“Christian!”

IX.

At last the eventful morning arrived. Albert had not slept a wink the night before. Too many tumultuous thoughts had kept him awake. He had called on Hedwiga the day before and her tears filled him with anguish. So he spent wakeful hours in composing a poem on the pain of parting and felt relieved.

Today everything was forgotten. For in front of the house stood a vehicle, bedded with hay, and two horses with fodder-bags over their heads, and inside the house his mother was packing his father’s large folding leather valise, and his sister and his little brothers, were watching with inquisitive, curious eyes. Albert was too restive to watch the packing. From time to time he stepped to the window and stole a peep at the horses outside, a strange joy in his heart, and walked back with his hands in the pockets of his new coat.

“Mama is crying,” piped up his little brother who stood close to his mother and followed her every move and insisted upon helping her, carrying a shirt from a chair nearby. Albert turned his head and glanced at his mother; she was brushing something from her cheek. His father was in the shop, making a few entries in his ledger and giving another look at his balance.

Soon Uncle Salomon arrived, and Aunt Braunelle and Aunt Hanna and Father Schumacher, with his long pipe in one hand and his silver-headed cane in the other.

“I hope you’ll become another Rothschild,” Schumacher said as he clasped the youth’s hand, an irrepressible smile on his fine face.

Mrs. Zorn overheard this and became more intent on forcing some handkerchiefs into the corner of the traveling bag; there was a touch of obstinacy around her mouth as she smoothed the bulging packet of linen.

The hour had come. Albert was seated in the hooded coach by the side of his father, the coachman on the box, a long whip in his hand. Mrs. Zorn rushed up to embrace her son once more. His sister reminded him to write to her all about the Roemer and the Zeil, and his little brother called to his father to remind him of the whistle “with three holes” he had promised. David Zorn murmured something, the coachman snapped his whip, and the coach started off with a rattle and clatter over the cobblestones.

Then everything moved before Albert’s eyes. Schmallgasse, the Marktplatz, the big bronze statue of Jan Wilhelm, the Great Elector, the Franciscan cloister, the domes of the churches, the Hofgarten—like a flowing river, everything seemed to move before him and away from him . . .

The vehicle lurched and they turned into the main road. Albert stuck out his head to catch a last glimpse of the disappearing town. The road ran along elevated ground and he saw in the distance only a mass of crowded red roofs and a few rising towers against the sunny sky. There was nothing clear in his mind; nothing but confusion. For he was already beginning to feel lonesome, his life-associations falling away like crumbling walls. His father was silent, absent-mindedly stroking his blond beard and clearing his throat from time to time.

The Rhine Road was finally struck. It followed the bank of the river and was only a short distance from the shore. The horses snorted and quickened their steps unbidden by the driver, the dull thump-thump of their hoofs on the sandy ground was music to Albert’s ears. Wafts of fresh air—the cool, moist air of spring—came from the winding river; a bird was twittering in the branches of a nearby willow; a calf was lowing afar off unseen; a tethered colt galloped in a circle; expanses of green and brown flew before his eyes; and the sky was pale blue with endless bars of gray scarcely discernible and blended with the more colorful texture around them. Now and then glimpses of the Rhine came into view through the clumps of vines, and Albert was dimly conscious of links between himself and Gunsdorf. The farther away he traveled from his native place the more endearing it became and the less alluring the city of his destination.

Presently his erstwhile enthusiasm for Frankfort was gone. He did not even think of it. He thought of nothing. He only felt a peculiar sensation in his heart, a sensation akin to pain, a feeling of loneliness possessed him. Unconsciously he moved closer to his father, who was now dozing. He felt dreadfully alone, and soon well-defined memories of Gunsdorf began to make inroads into his mind. His sister, his mother, Christian, Hedwiga. His mind was now centered upon Hedwiga. He let his head rest against the truss of hay back of him. His eyes closed. There was a strange longing in his heart. He stretched his hand and imagined he was touching the back of her neck, feeling her shudder as his fingers played with the soft down close to her ears. His lips moved as if he were tasting a savory dish. He sensed the sweet fragrance of her lips. . .

He turned quickly to the right. A girl’s voice was calling “Goodbye.” For a bare second he was deluded into believing it was Hedwiga’s voice. But when he craned his neck and peeped outside he beheld a farmhouse, a fence, an open wicker gate, a barefooted girl with a thin skirt fluttering in the air, a few strands of flaxen hair flying; a hand shading smiling eyes. By her side was a little boy waving his hand. . .

He leaned back and watched the stretches of field with a keener zest and listened languorously to the steady trot-trot of the horses, to the jingle of the harness. Everything was moving and there was a low hum in his ears and he felt the warmth of the covers around him and a strange vagueness before him . . .

THE JUDENGASSE.

I.

“Who is there?”

Albert rubbed his eyes. The voice sounded as if it were coming through a tunnel, muffled yet rumbling. There were other noises in his ears, stamping and pounding and shuffling of feet. And there was darkness around him, the darkness of black night.

“A traveler,” called another voice.

This voice was familiar to him. He remembered the voice of Bandy-legged Schultz—the name by which the coachman was best known in Gunsdorf—and that brought to his mind the memory of his departure from his native town, the long tedious journey, the stops at various taverns. He felt weary and every muscle ached. He wished he were at the end of the journey. And what dreams he had had since he left Schmallgasse!

“_Verdammte Juden!_ You are too late. The gates are closed.”

A shudder ran through the lad’s frame. He was now sure he was dreaming and buried his face into the cushion in the corner of the coach.

“Here, Schultz!”

It was his father who was speaking. He saw through half-closed eyes his father handing the coachman a silver coin. The driver jumped off the box and approached a high wall in front of him. Albert could not make out what the barrier was except that it was high and it cast a great black shadow, revealing in the foreground a little house, and beyond it a gleam of the moon, half hidden, as if balancing itself on the high wall.

Schultz knocked on the pane of a tiny window. He used the silver coin as a knocker. Then silence—ominous silence. Albert felt that his father was holding his breath and he, too, caught his breath and sensed the mystery around him.

“The lazy louts are asleep,” the coachman murmured.

David Zorn passed his hand over his head and emitted a grim grunt.

The coachman knocked again with the silver coin.

“Open the door—a traveler wants admittance!” he bellowed angrily.

There was a stirring inside the little house and a thud as of one rolling off a bench.

“The devil take the Jews! _Tausend Donner Sakrament!_ They don’t give a fellow a moment’s rest even on Easter Eve!”

A gruff voice was heard within, a clatter of a bolt—of a heavy iron hasp—the clanking of chains—the grating of a key in a lock, the creaking of hinges, two tall gates swinging open slowly, and Albert beheld a bit of sky above the horses’ heads. The sky appeared narrow and high, as if seen from a deep trench.

A short, heavy-set man, with a mustache the color of dry sand and the stiffness of bristle, appeared at the opening; between the swinging gates. He held a lantern in his hand, the yellow glare of the tallow candle inside fell grotesquely over his patched jerkin and saffron-colored hose.

Schultz put the silver coin into the hand of the man with the lantern.

The man put the money into his pocket and mumbled, “Don’t you know any better than to come so long after the gates closed!”

He was stretching his arms and yawning. His jaws opened and closed sleepily as he spoke.

“We are coming a long way,” the driver explained. “Couldn’t figure on the exact hour.”

“How many Jews have you?”

“Just one.”

The guard walked up to the wagon, raised his lantern, and strained his eyes.

“Huh! What do you call this, a suckling?” pointing at Albert, who stared around him in bewilderment.

“He is the gentleman’s son,” explained the coachman.

“You didn’t bring his cradle along—Huh! When a Jew reaches the age of twelve he is just as much of one for poll tax as he will be at seventy-five. We call it two Jews—huh! One Jew, he says! You can’t fool me!”

“How much is it?” Zorn opened his purse, the guard holding the lantern to help him see the contents.

“One Jew one _Thaler_, two Jews two _Thalers_—simple arithmetic,” snickered the guard.

Zorn paid the price in silence.

“How about a few _Pfennige_ for _Trinkgeld_—what do you say? I could have kept you waiting here all night. And tomorrow is Easter.”

Zorn handed him a few more coins and cleared his throat as if something was choking him.

Schultz led the horses by the bridles a few steps. There was another guardhouse inside the gates.

“Dovidle, stick your nose out—a couple of Jews for Easter,” the guard called in a piping, mimicking, sneering voice, and pounded on the casement.

A door opened and out came a little man.

The little man greeted Zorn kindly, extending his hand. “You must have come a great distance or you would have known better than to come so late.”

“Since when have they re-established the Ghetto?” asked Zorn tremblingly.

“As soon as they chased the French out,” replied Dovidle in a saddened, low voice. “Yes, they have hemmed us in again;” the little man sighed. “They are at their old tricks again, fleecing and torturing our poor people. Oh, God, will there ever be an end?”

Albert trembled in every limb, a piercing pain shot through his head. He had read of the miserable Ghettoes, which were abolished as soon as Napoleon’s troops occupied the Rhenish provinces, but he had never thought of himself as belonging to a segregated people. He had long forgotten the taunts of Long Kunz and Shorty Fritz. In his native city he had never thought, and was never reminded, of his ancestry. His parents’ indifference to creed had made him almost forget it himself.

The driver soon mounted the box, clacked his tongue, and moved on.

They proceeded slowly through a long, narrow street —it seemed to Albert interminably long and exceedingly narrow—the buildings on either side high and close together. It was dark—depressingly dark—with an occasional candle light peeping through a window. Not infrequently there was the sound of footsteps which was quickly drowned by the heavier tread of the horses. A door opened now and then—dabs of yellow against a black curtain—a slam, and silence again . . .

II.

Although warned not to wander alone through the streets outside the Judengasse, Albert’s curiosity got the better of him. No sooner was his father gone to see the banker, to whom Albert was to be apprenticed, than the boy left the tavern. He followed the long stream of people toward the gate at the end of the Judengasse. There were three gates in the enclosure, but this gate led to the Wollgraben, beyond which was the Fair.

He rambled aimlessly staring around him. He was proceeding along the banks of the Main, which was thronged with a thousand noisy traders, small vessels of antiquated design slowly moving to the accompaniment of the quaint cries of the steersmen. The tumult was deafening. Porters with high loads on their heads crying at the jostling crowd to make way; trundling bales, chests, caskets: yells of warning for the passersby to stand back: quarreling, half-naked boatmen; scolding red-coated officials, leaping from vessel to vessel on their tours of inspection: rattling of chains, plunging of anchors . . .

Presently he stood before the Roemer, the old Senate house, from which gaudy streamers were flying, its high gables bedecked with shields and banners; all around laughing, guffawing, merry-making. For today Frankfort was celebrating its independence once more, its independence from the enemy.

Carried along with the jubilant throng he soon paused at the sight of a curious procession. Mountebanks blowing trumpets, jugglers performing deft tricks, fencing masters displaying their agility in mock duels, a band marching and drumming and fifing, followed by girls clad in fantastic colors—yellow and black and green astride long sticks in the fashion of children playing horse, wiggling their high hips and heavy legs in the manner of Spanish dancers. Then came a column of bareheaded, barefooted chanting monks, wax tapers in the hands of some, while others carried effigies and tall banners on which were painted bearded apostles and smooth shaven saints, and great silver crucifixes against a background of jet black drapery . . .

Suddenly there was a hush. The chanting of the monks ceased; the shrill voices of the dancing girls died in the distance; the noises of the merry-makers halted. Not a sound—nothing but the soft swinging of censers. Hark! a silver bell tinkled. Instantly all were on their knees with bowed heads.

Fear possessed Albert. Though accustomed to Catholic ceremonies from childhood he would not kneel. And without looking to the right or left he hurried back as fast as his legs could carry him to the high walls of the Judengasse.

III.

In youth experiences produce impressions, at a maturer age they generate thought. Albert’s mind had the peculiarity of both, youth and maturity. Impressions and thoughts came to him almost simultaneously.

The humiliation of his present surroundings made him shrink with a sensitiveness he could not define. He had thought the Ghetto belonged to the dark ages. He did not yet realize that there was but a step between the Dark Ages and any Age. The bitterness of his soul crowded out every other thought, every other feeling. The jubilee he had witnessed was to him the rejoicing of the sporting Philistines around the chained Samson.

On his return to the tavern he threw himself upon his bed, his hands clasped under his head, his face toward the ceiling, tortured by a thousand conflicting thoughts. The back of his head was burning, and there was a pain in his eyes, the harbinger of one of his nervous headaches.

He tossed and turned. He felt as if the ceiling were coming down on him, as if the walls were pressing together, the very air seemed suffocating. Incoherently the morning scenes flitted through his mind—white robed priests—white—the symbol of truth and purity—the crucifix moulded of silver against a black background—another symbol—the images of saints, their eyes turned heavenward—Ah, that was too much for the impulsive, poetic youth, who never had to search for the truth, to whom truth came flying. He was writhing with pain, the mortifying pain of helplessness. No, he was not helpless, he was saying to himself. Socrates was not helpless; Spinoza was not helpless; Lessing was not helpless. Every one must carry his torch as well as his cross. Yes, he would make his torch flare so that it would dispel the darkness around him. A strange ambition seized him. He did not want to be a poet. He did not want to be a money changer. He wanted to be a warrior to help mankind free itself from its own enslavement. Nor did he crave earthly pleasures. For the moment he was an old man satiated with the pleasures and pains of life. Then came over him the sweeping melancholy of blossoming youth. The heavens opened before him and he caught a glimpse of eternity. Yes, he might fight—live and fight for the truth.

How strong the sun was shining in his eyes! Its rays were coming through a window opposite his bed. He turned his face to the wall, away from the light. Patches of pink and yellow and purple floated before his eyes in the shape of lotus flowers, and around them large golden wheels revolved, emitting diamond sparks, with the sound of a waterfall in his ears . . . No, it was not the sound of rushing water. It was a musical sound . . .

He soon recognized the tune. It was Allegri’s Miserere . . . and the light of an oblique column of sun dust was in his eyes . . He turned and noticed the strong sunlight falling upon the wooden image of the Christ—the wooden image that stood under those arches in the Franciscan cloister. It was the same figure, the same bleeding Christ with a broad gash between the ribs, the same smear of blood. The figure was nodding its head—it was beckoning to him—but he could not budge. The figure then began to move toward him, and the palms, instead of nailed to the cross, were unfastened and turned heavenward, and the head, instead of drooping, was thrown back, with derisive laughter on the sorrowful face—Yes, the figure was laughing, a strange, mocking laugh that made him shudder, and the laughter blended weirdly with the dying notes of the Miserere—

“Are you asleep, Albert?”

His father’s voice seemed to come from a great distance.

“No, I haven’t slept—I am just resting—” Albert mumbled and rose to a sitting posture.

“Herr Rindskopf assured me there is a great opportunity for you in his bank,” Zorn was saying cheerfully. “And he is a fine man to work for, Rindskopf is.”

Albert listened to his father as if in a dream, as if only remotely interested in the subject.

IV.

The following day was Friday, the busiest in the Judengasse. Zorn had made all arrangements with Rindskopf, but owing to the Sabbath he was obliged to remain here until Sunday. And this was the Sabbath of Sabbaths. It was the Saturday before the Passover—Shabbos H’godol—the Great Sabbath. Albert welcomed his father’s suggestion to accompany him to the synagogue that evening. Everything about him seemed so strange and quaint.

It was beginning to grow dusk when father and son started for the house of worship. The air was cool and refreshing, and the sinking sun was behind the high walls of the quarter. All men, and some women, were on their way to the courtyard which enclosed the House of God. The erstwhile grimacing faces, on which was written abject misery, were now serene, carefree, spiritual—

“In der Dämmerungstunde, plötzlich, Weicht der Zauber und der Hund Wird aufs neu ein menschlich Wesen—”

Some walked hurriedly, as if belated, others strolled in pairs, leisurely, exchanging a few words of week day interest, but peace, almost unearthly peace, everywhere. The long Judengasse was quiet, with an air of restful melancholy about it, the melancholy and rest of a plaintive song sung in a minor key. Not a horse stirred, not the creak of a wheel; the voice of traffic was hushed. Nothing but footsteps of those wending their way to prayers. Here and there one caught a glimpse of a table in a courtyard, its legs upward like a horse on its back, and other articles of household furniture, cleansed and scoured and left to dry and air until the morning before the holiday, when everything must be clean and free from every crumb of leavened bread.

Albert had never seen such a large house of prayer. It was hundreds of years old, and within its lofty walls many a tear had been shed—nay, rivulets had flowed from Israel’s eyes—and sometimes not unmixed with blood. For this synagogue had housed those who fled from massacres, from flames, from swords. Barricaded behind the tall doors, maidens sought shelter from ravishers, children from untimely death, old women from slaughter. Thrice this House of God had been defiled by Preachers of Brotherly Love; thrice the torch of fanaticism had scorched its portals. Like a man bent in sorrow, this edifice betrayed the scars of persecution. The Old Synagogue of Frankfort looked solemn, sad, awe-inspiring.

Albert felt the solemnity and the sadness of the old house of worship. It was vast and lofty. Many brass chandeliers with scores of wax candles were suspended from the high arched ceiling, snapping and flickering every time the great door swung open. Rows of high desks, made specially for repose of the prayer books, filled the front part, while the rear was devoid of all obstruction and reserved as standing room for the poor who held no pews. The nearer the row to the wall facing East the higher the rank of its occupants. For the Judengasse was never democratic. Its spirit was aristocratic. All had their ranks, and one could classify them according to the rows of the pews. In the very rear were the humblest—the water-carriers, the cobblers, the blacksmiths, the tailors—then came the small traders, and gradually the guilds rose higher and higher until they reached the row against the Wall facing East, where the dignitaries sat, the learned and the rich.

Zorn and his son were the guests of the dignitary whose pew was next to that of the Rabbi, a zealot, the descendant of a long line of rabbis.

Albert looked around with unconcealed bewilderment. For although he had scoffed at, and mimicked, the gestures of the zealots and mocked at their dogma and forms, he was now conscious of reverence. Even the Rabbi’s curly locks, dangling over his ears, his untrimmed beard, his long silk gabardine, his knickerbockers and white stockings, the mitre-like black fur cap on his head, his broad white linen collar—none of these provoked mockery in the youth. The figure before him conjured a Velasquez he had once seen in Prince Joachim’s gallery in his native town. He only saw in the visage before him the pure white skin shining through the scanty youthful beard, spirituality in the large pupils of his grayish blue eyes. While the prayers had not yet begun, the Rabbi, his face turned to the wall, was lost in devotion, swaying his body rapturously—sighing and praying and snapping his fingers in divine forgetfulness.

A resounding blow upon the altar was a signal for silence. All murmurs hushed. An irrepressible cough here and there accentuated the sudden stillness.

“_Lecho Daudi likras Kallo_,” the cantor in his lyric tenor trolled the first verse of a symbolic hymn composed by Salomo Alkabiz many centuries ago. After the manner of the Song of Songs, the Sabbath is compared to a Princess, with whom Israel is enamoured and whom he is wooing.

The rabbi, his face still turned to the wall, breathed every syllable as if he were in a trance, rolled his eyes heavenward in sublime ecstasy, spread his arms as if opening them for his beloved, a new light shining upon his countenance, glowing with the ardor of a lover, as he softly murmured,

“_Lecho daudi likras Kallo,_ _Pnei Shabbos Nekablo._”

Friday evening is the hour of betrothal of the Princess Sabbath to her lover Israel, but the Judengasse sighed even as it chanted this ditty.

Now the whole assemblage swayed like a forest in a storm—one could hear the soughing of the trees—responding with renewed ecstasy—

“_Lecho daudi likras Kallo,_ _Pnei Shabbos Nekablo;_”

and the sweet tenor picked up the refrain in the next quatrain and melted with song.

Albert did not join in the services, though his father held the prayer book before him. His eyes wandered. The flickering cathedral candles in front of the singing cantor cast a strange glamor over his bearded face and over his blue-black and white-striped robe; the dazzling gold and silver threads in the brocade curtain over the ark shimmered in the scintillating light of the _Ner-Tomid_.

Albert soon found himself in the midst of the great stream leaving the synagogue. The stream moved exceedingly slow. When one leaves the House of God one must not make God feel that he runs away from Him, just as one must hurry on the way to the synagogue in order to show anxiety to get to His presence. The ancient worshippers of Jehovah knew every whim and caprice of their Lord. They knew His appetite for the fat of lamb and veal and His relish for oil and frankincense—the rising smoke of all offerings was perfume to His nostrils. So, eager to please their Maker, they sauntered through the Judengasse with deliberate ease—there was pronounced luxurious relaxation in their movements—in pairs, in threes, in small groups, preceded by their children, moving shadows on the moon-lit ground. Albert walked along musing. There was mockery and reverence in his heart; the reverence and mockery were blended, as he caught snatches of conversation from the throng.

V.

For a brief period Albert was blind to all else save the romantic beauty of his environment. He did not even brood over the humiliation of being segregated. All Frankfort was then composed of segregated groups—hostile camps—towns within towns, fortresses within fortresses, every period of the distant past, clear back to the feudal days, indelibly stamped upon the inhabitants. His imagination was aglow with romance. Indeed the theme for a poem, a heroic poem—a poem to vie with the Odyssey—was born in his fantastic brain. In this epic he would tell the glorious story of Israel in the same manner as Virgil had told of Augustus and of the Romans. His hero was to be a descendant of Don Abarbanel, from the branch of David, and a fugitive from the Spanish Inquisition. Yes, he visualised his hero—he was a young man with greenish blue eyes and light brown hair, with poetic aspirations, and the heroine—

But with the beginning of his apprenticeship the subject lost all glamor for him. He found the banking business disappointing and the Judengasse disheartening. He had imagined a bank was—well, he did not clearly know what a bank was like except that money flowed from it like milk and honey in the promised land, and with money one could buy so many beautiful things. For aside from thought and feeling Albert was still childishly unpractical.

Rindskopf’s bank was a sombre room with a dingy little chamber in the rear, in which stood a large iron box and was fastened with three locks.

He had soon become dreadfully lonesome and homesick for Gunsdorf—the Gunsdorf he had been so glad to leave only a few weeks before. He longed for Schmallgasse, for the Marktplatz, for the Hofgarten, for Father Rhine, for Hedwiga. He had never known how much he loved his native town. How had he ever wished to depart from it, he asked himself again and again in his loneliness. He had already seen the house where Goethe was born, had again visited the Roemer and the Zeil and Sachsenhausen, and found nothing new any longer.

All his thoughts again turned to Hedwiga. He had despatched two letters of glowing passion and tenderness but had received no answer. So he stayed up late at night, writing heart-rending verses about a maiden with golden hair, who chanted as she sewed a shroud for her lover . . .

The banker had put Albert to copying letters and filling in draft blanks and the youth found the task irksome. At the end of the second week his work was done so mechanically and with such eloquent distaste that his employer, seated at his writing desk a short distance away shook his head and murmured, “_Der Junge hat kein Talent zum Geschaeft_.”

No, the young man had no talent for business. Adolf Rindskopf would have sent him away but David Zorn was his friend and he must endure his friend’s son a little longer. Besides, Albert wrote a very neat hand, with a flourish which Adolf secretly envied. When he wrote to Berlin—_die Kaiserstadt_—he was anxious to make an impression on his correspondent. Yes, Albert’s penmanship was beautiful.

But one day while Albert was seated at the long table copying a letter and thinking of other things, the postman came in. Albert looked up eagerly. Although he had already given up hope of hearing from Hedwiga, the postman revived his anxiety. But no letter for him. So he watched Rindskopf from the corner of his eye. He loved to watch Rindskopf open his mail. Rindskopf approached this task as a gourmand attacks a palatable dish. His eyes dilated, his bulky stolid body stirred restlessly in his chair, his lips twitched, avidity in every gesture. Then he took the large ivory paper-cutter in one hand, and with the other tapped the edge of the envelope against his desk and, raising it on a level with his eyes, screwed one eye almost tight as he fixed the other at the upper end, which he held against the light, and ripped it open with the utmost care for fear of touching the contents.

“_Tausend Donner Sakrament!_” Adolf suddenly exclaimed and jumped up from the chair, with the enclosure of the envelope in his hand.

Albert poised his pen, an amused smile on his boyish countenance.

Rindskopf’s face was flushed, his mustache twitched, his paw-like hands trembled.

“_Ach, du lieber Gott!_” he called upon the Almighty to witness his distress, and rushed up to Albert.

“You’ll bring ruination on me—what? Where is your head—what do you—”

He was so enraged that coherent speech would not come.

Albert’s face changed color. He paled a trifle and was terrified.

“This is a fine piece of business,” Rindskopf soon regained his voice—“What did you do with that bill of exchange?”

This strange demand puzzled poor Albert. He stared fretfully at his employer.

“What did you do with that bill of exchange I gave you the other day to forward to Berlin?” Rindskopf repeated, panting.

“—I—I enclosed it in the letter—as you told me—” Albert stammered.

Adolf’s eyes were dancing over the letter in his hand. Presently he was reading its contents aloud. “‘My dear Herr Rindskopf:

“‘In Frankfort, the birthplace of Goethe, love-songs may be called bills of exchange, but in our prosaic city of Berlin we mean precisely what we say. We have tried to cash the enclosed but without success; perhaps you can do better with it in your home town—’”

Rindskopf had caught the facetious tone of the letter and burst out in enraged laughter.

“Fine business I call this!” he cried as he continued reading the ironic reply, accentuating every syllable, contempt in his voice: “‘We are therefore returning your amorous ditty, much as we appreciate your romantic sentiments, and beg to send us instead a plain, matter-of-fact bill of exchange.’”

Adolf was beside himself. He called Albert a good-for-nothing, cursed the day he had let the boy enter the bank, swore that his wife had warned him against taking Zorn’s son into his house.

He then raised the returned enclosure to his eyes and began to read—

The money-changer was shaking with scornful laughter as he read on.

Albert was quivering, tears rushed to his eyes. It was not the mistake that vexed him but Rindskopf’s mocking voice. These verses were intended for the envelope addressed to Hedwiga!

Albert leaped forward and snatched the verses from Adolf’s hand.

“Where is my bill of exchange?” shouted Adolf.

Albert was not interested in the bill of exchange. His heavenly lyrics had been defiled! Their recital by Rindskopf was a piercing dagger in his heart.

“You are nothing but an ignorant boor!” Albert shouted back, striking a pose of sublime impudence. “What is your miserable bill of exchange compared with my poem—huh! Your _Thalers_! You ought to feel honored that you, an ignoramus, have a poet in your employ!”

Rindskopf shrank back, stunned. Such insolence from his apprentice!

Before Adolf recovered his wits Albert had put on his hat and with a look of unspeakable contempt strutted out of the place.

VI.

Albert’s conduct was a severe blow to his parents. Rindskopf had written to the elder Zorn and described the disgraceful scene to its minutest detail. “I could see from the very first day,” wrote Rindskopf, “that your son has no bent for business, but on your account I had endured him as long as I possibly could.”

The father made a hurried trip to Frankfort and tried to reason with Albert. He told him of the deplorable state of his finances and that further schooling was out of the question; and there was nothing for him to do at home.

The father had another friend in Frankfort, Veitel Scheps, who was a wholesale grocer and an importer of fruits from Italy. Veitel was willing to give the young man a chance to learn his trade.

Veitel was a little man, nothing but skin and bones, with a grizzly little beard, the end of which he was in the habit of chewing wistfully. Veitel seemed always absent-minded. There was a strange light in his big brown eyes. He was nearly sixty, but there was the fire of youth in his eyes. He received his friend’s son kindly and assigned to him the easiest work in his warehouse. He also housed him in his own home, and his wife, being childless, bestowed on Albert maternal tenderness.

For a short time everything went well. Albert liked Veitel and his place of business. The warehouse was sunless, filled with bales of dried fruits, casks of wine, boxes of oranges and lemons and dates, permeated with the pleasant odors of figs and raisins and the delicacies of the Italian soil. Albert’s task was to take down the numbers of the shipments and the quantities that came in and went out.

He loved to lose himself in the rear of the large storehouse, where there were narrow passages stacked with boxes and sacks and crates of wafting fragrance. The scents were inspiring. He had just read Goethe’s “_Briefe aus Italien_” and visualized the graphic descriptions of the great master. At times he would move listlessly through those darkened passages, conjuring visions of the land “_wo die Citronen blühen_.”

Meandering through these fruit-smelling passages he often imagined himself under the blue skies of Italy. A spear of sunshine stealing in through the crack of a dust-covered window pane enhanced the illusion. That was the glorious light of Italian skies shining upon the sun-baked lanes of Capri. It was not the creaking of the ungreased wheels of Franz’s wheelbarrow—Franz was the peasant lad trundling heavy-laden boxes—that he heard but the twittering of birds in the green foliage of Sorrento. A horse was neighing outside. Albert’s breast heaved with sensuous joy. For to his ears it was the braying of a donkey clambering up the narrow cliff road to Salerno.

“Albert!—Albert!” someone was calling, but he only heard the distant echoes from his wonderland. Leaning against a column of casks he paused and wrote verses that had been running through his head for days—

“Albert—Albert Zorn!”

The voice became impatient, irritable, anger in the tone. It was the voice of Veitel.

“Franz is waiting for the numbers!” he cried.

Albert tried hard to remember on which errand he had been sent.

Presently the agitated Veitel was before him. The wagon was outside and had to be loaded for the boat sailing for Coblenz and Albert stood there, staring at him like an idiot!

Veitel took a step back. The young man must have lost his wits. His wife had told him the boy had been acting queerly, always as if in dreamland.

For a moment Veitel was baffled. Perhaps he ought to run back for help. One could not tell what a maniac might do! The wife of a friend of his had been stabbed by a maid servant under similar circumstances, he recalled. She, too, had acted queerly—the maid servant had been melancholy—and suddenly, while she was peeling potatoes, she stabbed her mistress with her paring knife!

“Are you not feeling well, Albert?” Veitel’s tone was now soft, sympathetic, cautious.

He was moving back step by step, coaxing the young maniac to follow him. As soon as he emerged into the open Veitel gained courage.

“Where is the list?” he pleaded.

Albert shuddered. He could not free his mind from the illusion. He was still under the blue skies of Italy.

“Where are the numbers?” Veitel demanded.

“The numbers—what numbers?” Albert’s voice was somnolent. “Just a moment!”

He had not finished writing the last two verses and was afraid they might escape his memory, so while Veitel scolded he put the sheet of paper against a box nearby and scribbled the end of his ballad. He then looked up with clearer vision in his eyes.

“Didn’t you take the numbers down for the Coblenz shipment? Franz is waiting for them.”

“O, yes, the numbers;” and he rushed back to execute the order, Veitel staring at large.

“No, the boy has no talent for business,” Veitel confirmed Rindskopf’s opinion, and wrote a lengthy letter to his friend David Zorn.

This time the father made no trip to Frankfort. Instead he sent Albert money for the homeward journey.

VII.

He returned home downhearted. He felt the cheerlessness of his home-coming. The very excessive tenderness of his mother, the over-affectionate embrace of his sister, accentuated his failure. He felt the kindliness accorded the afflicted, the solace given to people in trouble. And although there was defiance in his bearing he felt keenly the disappointment on the faces of his family.

Nobody spoke of his future. Even his father—always full of plans—only cleared his throat, passed his hand lightly over his fine beard, and murmured “We’ll see”, whenever his wife broached the subject.

So Albert drifted. In his present state of mental confusion he postponed calling on Hedwiga from day to day. He stayed at home and read, walked the streets and mused, lay stretched on the river bank and pondered all sorts of things. He also spent much time writing, chiefly verses, which he clandestinely sent to editors who would not have them.

He wandered about the streets, along the river bank, like a liberated prisoner. No, he was not thinking of the Judengasse, of its tragedy, of its quaint traditions; he would not sing of the glory, and the tragedy, of Israel. He was emancipated, a true son of the Rhineland. He would sing of the shattered ruins on the banks of the Rhine peopled with golden legends, of beautiful Hedwiga, of fair Katherine, of pretty Gertrude. No, no, he was no descendant of Miram and David, he was no compatriot of Isaiah and Yehudah H’Levi, no fellow-sufferer of the dwellers of the Ghetto. The cradle of his forefathers had stood in Greece, her Gods were his Gods, the great unconquered world his world. And it was summer again. The sun was cooling its burning rays in the liquid silver of the gently flowing Rhine, a thousand echoes shouted greetings from the vine-clad shores, the mossy boulders called and beckoned to him to lie down and dream of things eternal!

All his slumbering romantic sentiments reawakened and with them came his longing for Hedwiga, his Lorelei.

On the morning he went to see her the sun was blazing in the skies and the road was dusty. His heart was pounding with joy as he left the narrow little streets of the town and struck out in the road that led to the Free House. No serious thought intruded upon his mind at present; he was carefree. The image of the slender girl with the golden locks was dancing before his eyes. He strode along jauntily, joyously, expectantly. The hut loomed up in the distance. He first caught sight of the large elm tree, and there was a fluttering in his breast.

Hedwiga! He saw her clinging skirt, her great black eyes, her bare feet, her beautiful throat.

What was this? A cart at the door! The two little windows of the hut wide open, and likewise the door; people moving about inside—a hearse! It must be the Witch. There was a pang of sorrow in his heart, but then she was old, and the old must die.

He entered the hut. Only three old women and a man; the women with hanging heads stood round a wooden box and the man held a board in his hands.

Where was Hedwiga?

The man waved the board in the direction of the box.

The morning sun cast a strange pallor over the dead face in the coffin. Albert trembled from head to foot and a flood of tears rolled down his wan cheeks.

The man looked at the youth without sadness. The three women, too, glanced at him puzzled.

Yes, the Witch had died two weeks before and now her niece was dead. They did not know what the girl died of—how could anyone tell what a person died of! The soul left the body and all was ended. There was a grimacing smile on the face of the woman who answered Albert’s questions. Maybe it was the evil spirits—who could tell?

He bent over the coffin for some silent moments. He stared blankly at the white shroud, at the waxen face, at the closed eyes . . .

Then the man and the three women carried the coffin to the cart outside, and the cart started and moved away slowly, the wheels creaking, crunching the clods of the dry mud . . .

A NIGHTINGALE IN A CROW’S NEST.

I.

“_Es küsst sich so süsse der Busen der Zweiten_ _Als kaum sich der Busen der Ersten geküsst._” Goethe.

What youth, what poetic youth, could not say this with equal truth if he would, had he the candor of the great bard of Weimar? Albert Zorn had more than candor; the public was his priest to whom he confessed more than he sinned. He never concealed the fact that to him woman was an antidote to woman. And love was such a wonderful inspiration for melodious verses! At times he could not tell which he loved most, the melodious verses or the woman who inspired them.

Had he already forgotten Hedwiga with that waxen face and white shroud? Indeed not; he sang of her in the most tragic refrains and dedicated to her memory a dream picture—_ein Traumbild_—and when he read it over and over, again and again, his heart almost broke and burning tears bedewed his flushed cheeks. But even as he wept for Hedwiga he yearned for some other pretty maiden to take her place in his heart.

He had changed considerably during this listless year. He had grown taller, his hair was longer and fell unevenly over his coat collar, and his sparkling eyes were even more narrowed, as if to hide from the people around him how much he could see; there was also something indefinable about the deep corners of his large mouth that seemed provoking. He carried a cane and brandished it dreamily as he strolled through the lime-tree lane in the Hofgarten, where there were always pretty girls in gay colors “like bright tulips planted along the flowery paths.”

The year seemed interminably long. Without school attendance, without any definite hours allotted to study or work, without any occupation, he was fancy free. He read whatever books suited his taste and gave expression to whatever ideas flitted through his brains. And after the ecstasy of composition would come despair, the despair that must come to the artist striving after perfection of expression, when he would regard his songs and dream-pictures as mere drivel. What would become of him! True, Christian was ever ready with his solace—the greatness of many had remained unrecognized for a time, he reminded Albert—but that did not console the young poet. Ah, he was a worthless fellow—what would become of him!

Then he would shut himself up in his room, without wishing to see any one. He would be weighed down by his grief, the grief of his conflicting emotions and thoughts. He would reveal himself to himself and hate himself. He had already passed his eighteenth year and nothing had happened. What would become of him?

But what was there for him to do? His father’s business was worthless; he did not care for his grandfather’s profession, though he had entertained it for a while since Schiller, too, had been a physician; and jurisprudence—well, he had no taste for that. Besides, a university career meant a great expenditure of money and he knew it was beyond his parents’ means.

At last the father wrote to his brother, Leopold, and asked for his advice. Leopold told him to send the young man to Hamburg. He would find a place for him.

II.

Albert arrived in Hamburg on a warm day late in June. He was dusty, hungry, tired. Travel by chaise to Hamburg was very fatiguing. And to add to his discomfiture when he reached his uncle’s town he found the shutters closed and the doors boarded, the family having departed for their summer home. Why had not his uncle given him specific instructions how to get to him? He was vexed and stormed at the coachman. A neighbor finally furnished his uncle’s business address. Everybody knew the location of Leopold Zorn’s bank.

Albert’s irritation increased at finding Uncle Leopold away.

“Was I not expected?” he demanded.

The pompous man, whom he addressed, smiled—haughtily, Albert thought—and turned away from him as if he were a tailor’s apprentice delivering a garment.

“Aaron, Herr Zorn’s nephew is over there,” the pompous man called—“that boy with the valise at the door—”

“That boy with the valise at the door!” Albert felt wroth enough to turn around and go back home with the same chaise. Huh! that boy with the valise at the door.

Presently his anger turned to laughter. A short, broad, middle-aged man, with sunken cheeks which were rounded by a growth of a beard streaked with gray, approached him. He seemed to lurch forward, rubbed his right hand against his greenish coat, and extended the usual greetings to him. His was a short, fat little hand, moist and clinging.

“Yes, my child,” he addressed Albert patronizingly, though not unrespectfully, smacking his lips after every few words as if feeling the taste of his utterance—“Yes, my child, your esteemed uncle has given me instructions to look after your wants. Ah, that uncle of yours,—a heart of gold!—yes, my child, pure gold, sifted gold—gold, as the Bible says, that comes from Ophir. God grant that we have a few more the likes of him; yes, my child, pure gold without a speck of dross. ‘Aaron,’ says he to me—‘Aaron Hirsch,’ says he, ‘my nephew will drop in one of these days during my absence and I want you to take good care of him and find him respectable lodgings.’ ‘Herr Banquier,’ says I to him, ‘you need not worry on that score, Aaron Hirsch will take good care of his benefactor’s nephew.’ Indeed, my child, I have just the place for you—yes, sir, just the place—the very best place—in fact. The widow Rodbertus on the Grosse Bleichenstrasse has a room overlooking a garden with two large windows. No back-hall bedroom for the nephew of the great banker, says I to myself.” Aaron laughed unctuously. “And it is not far from here either. Just a step as we say in Hamburg. Let me have the valise—it’s too heavy for you. I can carry it with my little finger.”

Aaron’s speech grew in fluency as they proceeded on the way to Widow Rodbertus, though “his little finger” had soon grown tired and he was forced to rest his valise on the sidewalk now and then.

He plodded on, his speech uninterrupted in spite of the encumbrance.

“You see, I am a trusted clerk in your esteemed uncle’s bank,” he said when they had reached Grosse Bleichenstrasse and, lowering his voice, he added, “but as a side line I sell lottery tickets. S—sh! Your esteemed uncle warned me not to sell any tickets to anyone in his employ or to any of the bank’s customers.”

“There is honor among thieves—hey? Only one robbery at a time,” Albert struck in.

Aaron suddenly let the valise drop to the pavement, and, with his hands at his sides, burst into convulsive laughter.

“That’s a good one—I must tell it to your esteemed uncle.” Then reverting to a more serious tone he said cautiously, “I sold your father the very first lottery ticket he ever purchased—ask him if I tell you a lie. And he came within three numbers of the Grand Prize. Just think of it—within three numbers! If the man drawing the lottery had just moved his hand a tiny bit further down—just a wee, wee bit—your father would have been the recipient of two hundred thousand marks! And do you think I’d have asked your father for a single _pfennig_ for having been his good angel—no, no, not a _pfennig_, not a _groschen_, not even a thank-you! No, my child, not Aaron Hirsch! I wouldn’t have asked your good father for a pinch of snuff.”

But they were soon inside, Aaron introducing the young man to Widow Rodbertus as the nephew of the “great banker” and Madame Rodbertus to Albert as the kindest soul that ever drew breath.

III.

When he found himself in his room free from Aaron’s chatter he grew sad again, the sadness of disappointment gripped him. Not a word of welcome from his uncle. And that fat pompous man in the bank—he had puffed and sputtered like a porpoise—that man called him a boy!—had not even introduced himself or said a friendly word to him! The thought burned in his brain; his heart was filled with bitterness. He was received like a poor relation—He! Albert Zorn, who was soon to make the world talk of him as they were now talking of Byron! Ah! that haughty man in the bank had looked at him as if he were an errand boy! He, Albert Zorn, with scores of lyrics in his valise and the first draft of a tragedy that would vie with Schiller’s “Wallenstein”, with “Childe Harold”! That red-faced, pompous man, proud of his purse—a mere money-bag! Huh! “That boy with the valise at the door”!

He paced up and down the room and finally paused before the window overlooking the garden. The garden of Aaron’s vision was a little courtyard with a pine tree in the center, encircled by meagre little shrubs. For a moment he stood gazing upon the lonely tree absently. Aside from the few stunted shrubs around it there was not a shade of green in sight. He soon felt a kinship with the tree. It was symbolical—like the fir tree before him he stood alone on the barren heights of the north, wrapt in a white coverlet of ice and snow, and dreaming of a palm tree in distant sunny lands . . .

His disappointment awakened in him crushing melancholy. Lonely and in silent sorrow on the scorching rock precipice! Tears trickled down his cheeks, though he was not conscious of them. Never had he felt so lonesome, so forsaken, the ground under him so barren and cold; and never had his heart so yearned for the warmth of the sun . . .

A door opened somewhere. It sounded loud in the quiet courtyard. The window before him was open and he leaned dreamily forward. He heard the voice of Frau Rodbertus on the threshold, escorting someone to the door. Another voice reached his ears—a silvery voice, the voice of a young girl, with the music of feminine sweetness in it. Sudden joy leaped into his heart. He did not feel so lonesome now. He felt as if a tender hand was soothing his irritated nerves; the sweet murmur of a brooklet was in his ears. He leaned a trifle forward. A young girl, with a green parasol in her hand, was taking a step at a time backwards, and talking to Frau Rodbertus. He found himself studying the girl’s face and figure, a strange tingling in his blood. A girl with soft brown eyes—that looked large and dark—black hair and a dainty yet vigorous little body. As she kept retreating he became conscious of the movement of her feet—there was something deliciously sweet, almost rhythmical, about her tripping movements, and about the swaying of her skirt.

“_Au revoir!_” The girl was taking leave of Frau Rodbertus in the soft accent of the French, not in that harsh voice of the German when interspersing French words in their conversation.

“_Au revoir!_”

The portal closed, the door downstairs was slammed. A feeling of delicious cheer in Albert’s being. The ground under his feet was no more barren and cold; he no longer thought of his uncle’s neglect, of that pompous man in the bank. He was dreaming of sunny lands . . . He again paced up and down the room but with throbbing joy in his heart.

He soon rushed to the little oak table at the window and sat down, as if something was propelling him to quick action. Volatile thoughts played hide and seek with his brain. He leaned back, his sensitive lips parted slightly, as of a person in a fever, his half-closed eyes as if in stupor. “Sweet eyes—blessedly sweet brown eyes,” he murmured. The tips of his delicate fingers moved slowly as if he were caressing a smooth cheek, his heart was pulsating in short, panting beats, and removing a sheet of paper from his breast pocket, as if in a dream, scribbled a line or two, murmured the words over and over, again and again, unearthly bliss stealing over his countenance . . .

IV.

Two days later his uncle returned from his summer home. Aaron Hirsch led him to the banker’s private office. Bowing and curtseying the unctuous Hirsch explained to his master how punctiliously he had carried out his orders and what wonderful lodgings he had procured for his nephew.

Leopold Zorn smiled benignly and was very solicitous in his inquiries about Albert’s father, his mother, and every one of the children.

The banker was of medium height but, seated, looked tall. He held his head erect, his high collar (cut low in front for the freedom of his longish smooth shaven chin) pressing against his closely cropped side-whiskers, which were once brown but now somewhat faded, with streaks of gray. There was a pleasant twinkle in his eyes, but it was the twinkle of the quick-tempered which can change to flashing fury upon the least provocation.

The uncle studied his nephew as he tried to draw him out in conversation, and felt disappointed. David had given him to understand that Albert was bright but he could detect no brightness in the young man. The boy was more like his father, a ne’er-do-well, passed through the banker’s mind; nothing of his mother. Furthermore, he was annoyed at the young man’s constant twirling of his walking stick. He felt that this conceited youth was not sufficiently impressed with his uncle’s importance. Callers at his private office did not sit with their legs crossed, twirling their canes. The banker’s annoyance was growing. He thought best to make the young man understand his place at the outset.

“I shall be glad to find employment for you here,” he said with a show of impressiveness and a knot appearing in his left eyebrow, “and if you show the proper spirit and industry you will have a chance to rise. But you must dismiss all nonsense from your mind (David had told him that Albert was fooling his time away on verses). You must give your undivided attention to business if you hope to make anything of yourself; and”—he cleared his throat and turned his eyes aside—“you must show the proper respect for your elders.”

Albert listened but was unable to concentrate on what his uncle was saying. Instead, his mind dwelt upon his uncle’s physiognomy. He liked the straight nose—rather broad at the bottom—and the well shaped mouth. He also liked his grayish hair parted on the side. The tone of his voice displeased him. There was a ring of haughtiness in it.

The next moment, however, his feeling warmed toward his uncle. Leopold mistook his nephew’s preoccupied silence for submission and instantly regretted his harshness. Leopold was quick-tempered but keenly conscious of his failing. Kind hearted to a fault it hurt him to think he was unduly severe with his brother’s son. He softened instantly and endeavored to make amends.

“I know you’ll like Hamburg. It is a city of great opportunities,” he said tenderly.

Albert’s face saddened. He realized the opportunities his uncle had in mind had a different meaning from those in his own.

“Don’t be so downhearted, Albert.” Uncle Leopold’s voice was now jovial, kindly, a pleasing smile in his eyes. He touched Albert’s knee as if to buoy him up. “Your work here won’t be hard. Are you short of money?”

He opened his wallet and handed him several bills.

Leopold touched the silver bell on his secretary and Hirsch appeared.

“Tell Herr Elfenbein to come in,” he ordered.

A stout red-faced man, with fleshy eyelids, a long gold watch chain resting on his spherical abdomen, like a sleeping snake on a sunny rock, presently appeared at the door. It was the pompous man Albert saw on the day of his arrival.

“Martin, this is my nephew—David’s son—this is Herr Elfenbein, Albert—”

Martin extended a lax hand.

“Albert has had a good education and writes a fine hand,” Uncle Leopold added, “and I’ll place him in your care. But don’t spare the rod.” The banker’s face was writhing in smiles as he said this and then laughed jovially. “I think Albert needs a little discipline—hey? What do you say, Albert?”

“Don’t worry, we won’t spare him,” returned Elfenbein, smiling.

And indeed Martin Elfenbein did not spare him. Martin was a hard taskmaster and gave orders in a surly voice, devoid of human warmth. Albert began where he had left off at Rindskopf’s—copying letters, filling in exchange blanks, and other uncongenial labors.

He grew morose and kept to himself. Even poetry had lost all interest for him. He picked up a volume by Goethe, by Lessing, by Schiller, but their song received no response from his soul. Was his imagination becoming barren? He tried to express his despair but even in this he failed. His mind was a blank. No new thoughts, no fresh sentiments, nothing but stagnation.

One morning his uncle invited him to his country home and at once his slumbering sentiments reawakened. The hope of meeting his cousin Hilda, whose memory he had cherished since she visited Gunsdorf two years ago, changed his depressing gloom to buoyant cheer. His muse had suddenly returned. He was full of song and merriment.

HILDA.

I.

The sight of Hilda seemed to Albert like a dream come true. Instead of the girl of his fancy, however, he was met by a young lady with the poise of one accustomed to drawing room manners. The girl of his memory was an unsophisticated young girl of fifteen. And while she was cordial, her cordiality lacked the intimacy he had hoped for.

His inner chafing made him regard everybody around him with misgiving. With the hypersensitiveness of the dreamer he divined disparagement in the glances of the smartly dressed people around him. He felt himself an outsider, a mere poor relative. He wished to flee, and would have fled but for the presence of his cousin.

But the more friendliness shown him the more restless he became. It was not friendliness he wanted. He craved affection, not merely the formal friendship of a host. And the people about him treated him as a guest, yet differently from the other guests who were visiting the banker at the time. The other guests were a lively group and indulged in dances, games, and amusing pastimes, none of which engaged his interest. His aunt encouraged him and gave him veiled hints about the amenities of society and etiquette, and this exasperated him still more.

So instead of joining the gay circle he would repair to the seashore, a short distance away, and spend hours watching the tide, with tumult in his brain and bitterness in his breast.

One day at sunset he found himself alone on the seashore, a creeping, soothing melancholy stealing over him. There were horizontal bars in the west resembling a rustic fence, one plank of which was jagged and broken, with tatters of gold and silver streaming from it, as if the sun in its flight had forced its way through this barrier, leaving behind fragments of its gorgeous raiment. For a while he sat and gazed with rapture in his heart. He sat crouched like a Japanese Buddha, his eyes screwed up, his elbows upon his knees, his head between his hands.

He yielded to the scene before him sensuously, his whole being immersed in it. He gave himself to the fight and sounds as a voluptuary gives himself to lust. He was scarcely conscious that he was thinking of Hilda instead of the sunset. He thought she had been paying no attention to him. And yet there was something about her that gave him hope . . .

Footsteps down the poplar lane. His heart beat fast. He knew they were her footsteps; and she was alone. Had she seen him? She turned quickly around and walked back. She walked rapidly with the unsteady gait of fright.

“She hates me,” he murmured to himself. Perhaps? There was again a flutter of hope. He had read a great number of romances and began to reason, as if reason ever helped a lover solve the great problem. But he reasoned both ways with equal conviction. She-loves-me and she-loves-me-not are reached by the same route. He found his place of vantage less enticing. The sunset and the restless sea lacked the romantic interest of a moment before. His mind drifted in other directions. He thought of his uncle, of his aunt, of the guests. Why did he find himself out of joint with people around him? What was there that made him rebellious in their midst? Why did he feel their faults so keenly, so glaringly? Why was he not in sympathy with them? He had felt out of place in Gunsdorf, in the Judengasse, and now he was feeling out of place at his uncle’s house. His thoughts, his tastes, his inclinations, his aspirations, were all Hellenic—there was not a vestige of the Hebraic in him, he concluded. He did not yet realize that these vagaries, this very world-weariness—the _Weltschmerz_—was Hebraic, that what he thought emanated from the Acropolis, came from Mount Carmel and from the plains of Sharon.

In the evening he found himself alone in his room, the silence of the summer night around him. He was thought-weary. He had blown out the candle and welcomed the darkness. A nightingale was singing somewhere in the grove. He pushed the window further open. He caught the distant sound of the waves breaking on the cliffs; it was the sweeping sound of contending forces. A fire-fly was flitting around—intermittent pin-pricks in the dark curtain before him. His fatiguing thoughts had fled. His brain was a blank. He was only a child of the senses. Peace gathered within him, the sweet peace of night and of silence. Emotions possessed him—no, not emotions which stir conflict but those that instill a conscious soothing, a slumbering sensuousness. He leaned back in his chair by the window, unseeing, unthinking.

Gradually—in faint outline—the image of Hilda was before him . . .

There had been dancing earlier in the evening and he now saw Hilda waltzing around the room, her firm little feet moving nimbly, a twinkle in her roguish eyes as she flitted by and glanced over her partner’s shoulder toward where he was seated. Confound it, why had he never learned to dance!

He recalled the last time he had made an effort to learn to dance and laughed at himself. He could now hear that little Frenchman count _un, deux, trois—un, deux, trois_. The Frenchman shook his head and told him he had no rhythm in his soul! If he had told him he had no rhythm in his feet he could have forgiven him. Albert was in a rage and the French dancing-master ran for his life, and later told everybody that Herr Zorn was quite mad, quite insane.

Yes, he ought to learn to dance. He must learn the amenities of the young, as Aunt Betty had hinted. In some ways he acted like a middle-aged man—this was what Aunt Betty had said smilingly. Perhaps this was the reason Hilda was acting so peculiarly in his presence, he said to himself; she treated him as if he were middle-aged. He was too agitated to sit still . . .

He jumped up from his seat and walked across the dark room. No, no, he could not be like the others—he could not—those shallow-brained parrots, repeating the same phrases, the same platitudes, the same inane compliments to ladies—he could not bear these smug Philistines! But Hilda——

A bird was singing. Yes, it was the melting notes of the nightingale. He was again seated by the window, thoughtless, a delicious sensuousness filling his whole being, his eyes resting on the shadow of the trees in the light of the stars, the tranquility of the night possessed him . . .

II.

He arose quite happy the next morning, boyishly happy. He wrote a few verses and felt happier still. Then he read his lines over and the music of his own words made him jubilant. Dissatisfaction with his composition never came to him until the day after; on the same day he was always happy, always pleased with himself——

And his mood seemed contagious. Aunt Betty smiled upon him and Hilda, too, suddenly seemed attentive. She even suggested a walk with him, and on the way through the garden stooped to pluck a rose for him and then plucked another, the stem of which she held between her teeth, the red flower drooping over her chin. He found himself talking to her without timidity, without constraint, and she, too, laughed and recalled little pranks he played on her when she visited Gunsdorf. He reminded her that she had been a little girl then, her hair like a loose skein of silk hanging down her back and even remembered the color of her dress and the ribbon she had worn in her hair. His voice seemed to caress every garment of hers as he dwelt in detail upon her dress in those days and her attire now. She blushed as her eyes met his. She felt as if he had actually passed his hand over her dress as he contrasted her former short dresses with her present long skirt. He kept at a respectful distance from her but once or twice his sleeve came in contact with her sleeve and he consciously shrank back half a step, and she was strangely conscious of the momentary touch.

He talked freely, bubbling over. He was alone with her, just she and he. He felt for a moment that there was nobody else on earth but the two of them. And they were walking through the narrow paths, high hedges on either side, the sunlight sifting through like the finest silvery powder, birds twittering and chirping everywhere. At times she walked ahead of him—when the path was too narrow for them to walk side by side—the bit of neck between her coiled hair and the collar of her dress a delicious magnet, her elastic yet vigorous step music to his ears. He was deploring the fact that so few people in Hamburg were interested in poetry. She agreed with him and that irritated him without knowing why and he became cynical.

“The people in Hamburg care more for beer and _sauerkraut_ than for Lessing and Goethe,” he was saying. “They lack romance—” Then he tossed his head, with a spiteful smile on his lips, and added, “When Cupid darted his arrow at the Hamburg women he struck them in the stomach instead of the heart.”

Hilda walked on in silence. His witticism displeased her. He had made a few slurring remarks about Hamburgers before. They were walking side by side and he noticed the slight change in her face. She did not seem as friendly as before.

“I was not referring to all Hamburgers,” he said in a jesting tone emphasizing the _all_.

He wished to make some allusion to herself but could not. She suddenly seemed so distant. He thought he detected anger in her eyes. Then he attempted playfulness, but that seemed to annoy her still more. Women were a capricious lot, he concluded. He was beginning to understand women, he was persuading himself, without realizing that to understand them was the surest means of being disliked by them.

When they returned to the house they found the family on the veranda. Hilda rushed up to her mother as if she had lost her way and at last found it. He again felt awkward.

He went to his room and finished the poem that he had begun the day before and copied it in a neat hand and again went in search of Hilda. He found her seated on the ground under a tree with a book in her lap.

He approached her without timidity and at first stood by her chatting, then sat down beside her. Albert was a good talker when he had a definite subject but lacked the art of polite social conversation. He was at his best when attacking or praising someone or something. The book in her hand was a peg on which to hang conversation, and he made an attempt to look at it.

“Is the book so bad that you would not have anyone see it?” he teased her as she declined to show it to him.

“No, it’s a good book,”—still holding it behind her as if to prevent him from seizing it.

“By whom was it written?”

She shook her head negatively, a faint smile in her eyes.

“What’s the name?”

Her head again shook from side to side.

“What’s it about?”

“You are too young to know.” She laughed softly, her eyes contracting.

“Let’s talk of something more interesting—Rudolph, for instance.”

(Rudolph was one of the young men of whom Albert was jealous.)

She gave a short mischievous laugh.

He looked at her earnestly. He wondered why she was teasing him about Rudolph. Her mobile features underwent expressions he could not understand. Then he turned to her suddenly, with self-pity in his voice, and said, “Why do you dislike me so much, Hilda?”

And before she had a chance to reply he added petulantly, “Everybody here dislikes me—everybody!”

There was the peevishness of the vexed child in his voice, with a lump of emotion in his throat.

Although he had not clearly thought of this before, no sooner had the words escaped him than he believed them. He felt himself hated by all around him.

Her attitude toward him changed instantly. Leaning forward, with the book replaced in her lap so he could see it was “Herman and Dorothea”, she said, “Oh, Albert, you only imagine things. Mother is very fond of you, and so is father, only they don’t think you apply yourself to business assiduously enough.”

Her beautiful sea-green eyes rested on his face sympathetically. She looked at him as if to convince him she was not merely saying this to soothe him.

“I know, I know, they all think me an idler, a good-for-nothing, a worthless fellow.” His words came precipitately, passionately. “They can’t see any good in anyone unless he is immersed in business—nothing counts but business success. All I hear is money, money, money everywhere!” He raised his hands as if he meant to shut out the sight of money. “It rings in my ears from morning till night—it rings all over Hamburg. It’s deafening—money! Nothing else interests anybody. Neither literature nor music nor art of any sort. Money seems an end in itself. Ah! It’s maddening—maddening! I am made to feel every moment that God created all the beauty in the world—the green trees and the blooming flowers and the foamy waves—and women’s beautiful eyes and their luxuriant hair and their crimson lips (he was looking at her yearningly)—with only one end in the scheme of creation—money! Oh, I am disgusted with everything——.”

“You are morbid, Albert,” she said, looking straight at him and noting the despondency in his dreamy countenance. Then she smiled and added, “You are a Werther without a Charlotte.”

He felt the sting of her remark. To him her flippant retort was full of meaning.

“Even you hate me,” he burst out.

He turned his face away.

“What makes you say such things?” she demanded.

“I can see it. You don’t act toward me as you do toward—” he tossed his head without completing the sentence.

“As I do toward Rudolph,” she finished it for him with a light laugh. Then she gazed at him for a moment and, shaking her head, said, “You silly boy.”

“I don’t blame you—Rudolph is a shrewd business man and I am only a clerk in your father’s bank—”

“So you think I am in love with Rudolph—”

“I know you hate me—”

“Why should I hate you?”

Her sparring with him cheered him even though his face was still sad. He was happy to hear her contradict him. They soon drifted to “Herman and Dorothea” and he began to talk of Goethe. He wished to read her the poem he had just finished but he wondered if she would divine who had inspired it. He persuaded himself he did not want her to know this. And while he was battling with the idea his hand traveled to his pocket and he withdrew the neatly copied verses.

He watched her face eagerly as her eyes wandered over the sheet. She seemed to be reading every line over and over in order to grasp their meaning.

He had hoped she would make some allusion to the subject described. He had also hoped she might ask him for permission to keep the poem, but not a word. Her eyes only contracted a bit, a faint deepening of color on her cheeks, and she had suddenly again grown distant. He felt as if she had unexpectedly stretched out her arm and forbade him to come near her. He was conscious of the awkwardness of her silence. Her lips were closed tightly as she would not open them for fear a word might drop.

“You think poetry mere drivel, don’t you?” he said as he awkwardly replaced the poem into his pocket.

Her eyelashes rose, a silent look, but without a responsive syllable.

“At least you think _my_ poetry is drivel,” he soon added.

There was the faintest smile playing around her lips. Her silence and smile seemed to him a challenge. His dormant pride, his sublime confidence in his powers, suddenly made him boastful. There was fire in his eyes.

“You just wait and I’ll show you all that my poems are no drivel. I’ll make my songs ring throughout the land. Every man, woman, and child shall read them. You may all laugh at me now—and Rudolph may jest about me—but I’ll make them all listen to me some day—”

He looked at her face but could read nothing in it. The next moment he became conscious of his boasting and felt ashamed of his utterances.

“Oh, I am a fool,” he burst out as if talking to himself. “You think me a braggart, don’t you?” He touched her hand and looked beseechingly at her.

She looked at him intently for a bare second.

“I am very unhappy,—I’ve always been unhappy. I am a little child crying for the moon, and the moon is so far, far away and doesn’t even know that a poor child is crying for it.”

There were unshed tears in his eyes.

“Why do you make yourself so unhappy?” she asked and stirred, with a frown on her pretty face.

But he did not answer. He noticed the approach of Uncle Leopold and Aunt Betty.

“Why so serious?” Aunt Betty asked, smiling and at the same time studying Hilda’s face.

“We were discussing poetry,” she answered, rising.

III.

Albert appeared at dinner and vanished immediately after that. He scarcely spoke a word during the meal. But this was not unusual. Dinner in this household was served with such elaborate ceremony—waiters and butlers and many courses—that the stiffness of it all robbed him of speech. Aunt Betty noticed his glance in Hilda’s direction once or twice but her daughter ignored her cousin entirely. The mother heaved a sigh of relief. She had been unduly alarmed.

What the watchful mother failed to observe was that as they rose from the table and were passing to the adjoining room Albert dashed across to Hilda and mumbled something in a panting voice and left abruptly. She paled but did not turn to see whither he had gone.

She joined her family but after a while chose a secluded place, apparently reading. She turned the pages of her book as if she were perusing them without seeing a word before her. She seemed vexed and perplexed and now and then jerked her head as if shaking off an intruding thought. Finally she walked up to her room and closed the door resolutely as if she had made a decision and given emphatic expression to it. She then threw herself on her bed and lay for a time, staring at the ceiling.

“Seven o’clock near Klopstock’s grave,” she murmured to herself.

Shortly after that she walked down stairs and remained standing in the doorway over the veranda and walked slowly, deliberately, down the broad stone steps, pausing and lingering a while on every step, like a playful child, and looking at her feet as she moved them. When she reached the pebbled path of the winding walk she played with the little stones with the tip of her dainty slipper as if there were not a single thought passing through her mind. Presently she was standing before the marble-walled well in the centre of the garden and looked curiously at the carved figures on the outside as if she had never seen them before. Dimly she remembered that Albert had spoken of them the other day—they were mythological figures and he had explained them to her. She recalled his face and the manner in which he looked at her as he spoke of the beautiful goddesses of Greece.

She was soon out of sight of the beautiful mansion on the hill, sauntering down the slope that led to the seashore. Along the Elbe was a cliff-walk that led to a promontory on which was the grave of him who sang of The Messiah.

The sun was going down but it was still long before sunset in this northern clime. There was a golden haze in the air, with hoards of mosquitoes and tiny insects in column formation flitting about like a dancing procession. Klopstock’s grave was west of the Zorn villa, where the sun was sliding down the curving horizon and making the many-branched linden tree over the tomb look like a burnished bush. There was tumult in her brain and her heart was beating irregularly. A number of limes she halted and half-turned, as if she were attempting to twist herself loose from the embrace of some invisible being, but soon again she proceeded on her way.

“I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” he said as he came running toward her. His teeth were almost chattering, his voice was strained.

“I shouldn’t have come—I know I shouldn’t,” she was saying, scarcely glancing at him.

“Why do you despise me so?—”

He touched her hand which she withdrew quickly and put it back of her like an angered child.

“You don’t know how miserable I feel—Hilda—.” His voice was plaintive, pleading. “I know you detest me—You don’t even care for my poems, the echoes of my heart. Oh, Hilda—just a word—”

“You make me so unhappy,” she interrupted him. He thought he saw anger in her eyes.

“I am so sorry if my love makes you unhappy.” His voice was now penitent, humble, beseeching. “But I can’t help it, Hilda. We don’t will love—love wills us. I understand. I am not blaming you—you can’t help hating me as I can’t help loving you. I am not as dull as you think. I understand—Some girl might love me and I mightn’t care for her—”

Her eyes dilated; a pallor crept over her cheeks.

“Is that girl in Hamburg?” There was naiveté in her tone.

“There is no other girl. No one is in love with me. I was only explaining how nature works. One loves and the beloved loves another—”

“I am sure you have a girl in mind. Who is she?”

“I swear to you there is no one—”

“I am sure from the way you said it there is someone—anyhow, you wouldn’t tell me even if there were—”

“I would tell you the truth—I wouldn’t be ashamed to tell you if someone were in love with me. Oh, a long time ago—I was a youngster then.”

“Is she still in love with you?”

He waved his arms in despair.

“Oh, no, she is dead—But I am not thinking of anyone but you—”

“What did the other girl look like? Was she light or dark?”

“Oh, why speak of her—she is dead, I tell you—” he spoke impatiently.

“You must still be thinking of her or you wouldn’t remember her now. I am sure you are in love with her still—was she pretty?”

He was beside himself.

“I tell you she is dead—” There was exasperation in his tone.

“And you mean to tell me you never had a love affair since then?”

She was drawing an 8 on the ground with the tip of her slipper.

“Of course I have never loved anyone as I love you.”

“Then you did love her!”

“I might have had a boyish fancy—I wrote a poem about her—”

“And some day you’ll write a poem about me and all will be ended.”

“Hilda, why do you torture me so?—”

He clasped her hand and kissed it. She withdrew her hand and said he must not do this.

“I know I shouldn’t have come here—I know I shouldn’t—some one might have seen us—”

“And what if they did?”

“Oh, Albert, you don’t understand—”

He was about to seize her hand again but she ran down the path.

IV.

When Hilda had suddenly left him he remained at Klopstock’s grave until the stars appeared. He found the grave symbolic. The grave was the only place for a poet, he mused in despair—yes, a silent grave under a shady tree, the roar of the sea in the distance, the silence of fields around. Ah! the serenity and the beauty of lying still without surging blood, without agitated nerves, wrapt in a white shroud in the bosom of the cool earth, in peace, with no sound save the swaying of the branches and the chance song of a bird! The burden of youth was oppressing him, the presentiments of sorrows to come were in his heart. For the moment he wished he were dead—dead at the feet of the silent poet who had sung so gloriously of the Redeemer. He remained standing before the grave in sad contemplation of his plight. In vain had he consoled himself that Hilda loved him. She was just playing with him, he mused bitterly.

He presently fancied himself dead, stretched on the grass alongside the hillock which held the dust of the great poet, Hilda standing over his corpse and weeping. There was a touch of joy in his fantasy. Hilda weeping over his dead body!

He had no recollection of returning to his room. He was dimly conscious of trying to fall asleep when Klopstock opened the door softly and tripped in. Klopstock was wrapt in a white shroud and his face was of a deathly pallor. His face seemed so feminine, and the eyelashes drooped like Hilda’s. Klopstock then waved an arm and exclaimed—

“Seven times the thund’rous strokes had rent the veil, When now the voice of God in gentle tone Was heard descending: ‘God is love,’ it spoke; ‘Love, ere the worlds or their inhabitants To life were called’——”

Klopstock wept as he recited these immortal lines and his copious tears dropped on Albert’s brow and curled into the corners of his mouth. A poet’s tears were saltier than those of ordinary mortals, Albert was saying to himself as he felt the taste of the drops. He wondered what Rudolph was doing there. For it was not Klopstock but Rudolph standing at the foot of his bed. Rudolph was pulling Hilda by the arm and she was laughing—everybody was laughing, and the orchestra was playing at the Swiss pavilion on the Jungfernstieg. Strange that instead of the musicians it was the linden tree—the linden tree over Klopstock’s grave—that stood in the middle of the musicians’ platform. To the right of the tree was an open coffin, the lid lying alongside of it. Somebody was reading a prayer—he could not tell whether it was in Latin or in Hebrew—yes, it was Aaron Hirsch reading from a prayer book, tears coursing down his bearded face.

“You are dead, Albert Zorn—you are dead—you are dead,” Hirsch was saying. Then he felt himself lifted into the coffin, the coffin was lowered, clods of earth falling upon the lid—thud! thud! thud!—he was choking—he was trying to get his breath . . .

When he awoke he remembered that he was to leave for Hamburg early that morning. Yes, somebody was knocking at his door. He dressed quickly, for he knew his uncle was an impatient man, and rushed downstairs, where he found him pacing up and down the drawingroom, a cigar between his teeth. He seemed angry, and when Albert bade him good morning he grunted. Soon Aunt Betty appeared, and told him to go to the dining-room and have his breakfast as they had already had theirs. The rest of the family had not yet risen.

Aunt Betty was kinder than visual. Before leaving she was very solicitous and kissed him affectionately.

Soon the carriage rolled away along the road lined with poplars, the rising sun shining cheerily, birds carolling merrily, the horses whipping their tails in high spirits . . .

V.

At present Hamburg seemed to Albert even more prosaic than ever. He felt more lonesome, everybody bored him. As the master hums so do the hirelings sing. Everyone in the bank treated him as if he did not belong there, and the little courtesy he received was perfunctory, and out of respect for his uncle. They had no regard for a young man who wrote poetry and talked philosophy. Aaron Hirsch was the only one who showed him proper respect, but even he looked around as if afraid to be caught talking familiarly with the young idler.

On the day of his return from his uncle’s villa, Aaron clasped his hand and held it rather affectionately for a moment or so.

“I’ll bet you had a wonderful time. Isn’t the villa wonderful! Salomon in all his glory never had a finer palace. And the grounds!” He shrugged his shoulders with an expression of the inexpressible. “It made me think of the Garden of Eden. And that stream running through the woods back of the mansion—It’s just like the river Hiddekel in the Bible! Yes, sir, a veritable Garden of Eden, with no beguiling serpent to cause trouble in the family—”

Aaron laughed a loud “Hi-hi” and “Ho-ho!” but he presently checked himself, with a serious grimace on his face.

“You don’t seem very happy—” He eyed him scrutinizingly. “Perhaps there was a beguiling serpent after all.” He emitted a forced little laugh.

“There is a beguiling serpent in every Garden of Eden,” replied Albert in a jesting tone.

Hirsch then began to talk of other things.

“I should like to take you to the Reform Temple,” he was saying, “where all the aristocrats go. I? No, I don’t belong there. I am an old-fashioned Jew, and orthodoxy is good enough for the likes of me. And to tell the truth—” he moved closer to Albert and lowered his voice as if he were about to confide a secret—“I don’t care much for this hocus-pocus reform. If I want to pray to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, I need no groaning organ or chanting choir to carry my prayers to heaven. No, not me. Whenever I visit the Reform synagogue I am reminded of the time the Prussian King was here last winter. There was so much parading and drumming and shooting of cannon in his honor that when he addressed the people no one could hear a word he said. Yes, my child, I am an old-fashioned Jew. I love my Hebrew prayers with all their trimmings as I love my _Chalet_ cooked in the old way—I prefer it to the best _Rost-Braten_ prepared by your uncle’s chef. When I want to pray I wrap myself in my _talis_ and pray. I don’t care for the Protestant hymns Judaised. I prefer a heart-to-heart talk with my God in the language we both understand—God and I—and no elocutionary nonsense. I mean no offense, God forbid—no, no, I know my place and mean no criticism of my betters. Your esteemed uncle belongs to the Reformers, and I get my bread and butter from him. Indeed, I do not mean to criticize my superiors, but when I get to the Temple I get the shivers, so help me God! There is no warmth in it. Doctor Kley, the preacher, is afraid to make a gesture with his arms for fear he might be mistaken for a Jew—” Hirsch bleated long and juicily—“and the congregation sit as if they are afraid to stir and awaken God from His slumber. A hearty prayer for me! The God of Israel never cared for Hamburg manners.”

“Why don’t you try and convert my uncle?” Albert goaded him on.

“I convert your uncle? There are too many conversions already; and far be it from me—a common, everyday man—to proselyte. Aaron Hirsch knows when to talk and when to hold his tongue.”

“Why not turn Christian and be done with it?” asked Albert, hiding an inner chuckle.

Aaron placed the index finger at his elongated nose and, glancing at the young man sideways, his head slightly inclined to one side, said, “Christianity, my child, is no better than Judaism. There is Catholicism for instance—I went into a Catholic church the other day and the sadness of it all and the flickering of candles and the smell of incense made me feel that God had just died and had not been embalmed soon enough. No, no, my child, a living, cheerful God for Aaron Hirsch!”

“How about the Protestant religion?”

“That’s a little better, I own. I visited the Old Protestant Church only last year. No crosses, no effigies, no incense, no smell of the dead—honestly, if they left Jesus out of their ritual I might be tempted to let the Protestants join our synagogue.”

Albert found Hirsch stimulating. As in the case of books Albert did not find Hirsch valuable for his own sake but for his jabber that aroused new thoughts in his brain.

After business hours he could not remain in his room and yet would accept no invitations to call upon those who desired to show him hospitality. He often left his room in self-defense against Frau Rodbertus’ monologues. She was tall and flat, her hair parted in the middle, a gown sweeping to the floor and only betraying the tips of her slippers. Her face was always in repose, her lips pouting, as if she were ready to be painted at any moment. She habitually had her hands clasped in front of her, even when standing, and when in action (she never stopped talking) she slightly moved her head from side to side with the coquetry of a young girl on her first introduction to a presentable young man. Albert had no difficulties in finding out that the pretty girl he saw at her house on the day of his arrival was the daughter of a French emigré, a relation of hers.

Although, as directed by his uncle, Aaron volunteered to show him the city, Albert preferred to make his own discoveries. He tramped the streets, dropped into cafés, studied the people about him and when bed-time came was exhausted and irritated. There was no variety of types here to arouse his lively imagination. Big, rotund men with red faces, and insipid flaxen haired youths with expressionless eyes and duel scars; stout, dull women, and flighty girls who flaunted their sex in the face of every passerby on the Jungfernstieg.

He would return to his room overwhelmed by a feeling of sordidness. No new thoughts, no fresh sentiments, nothing but stagnation. He was in despair. He feared the poet in him had suddenly died. An alarming thought raced through his brain one evening. Was the ambition of his youth a vain dream? He picked up a volume of Goethe, of Lessing, of Klopstock, but they received no response from his soul; they did not thrill him; their beauty was meaningless to him; their imageries evoked no visions in his mind. A terrible fear possessed him. Was he becoming sterile? Was his imagination barren? He tried to express his present despair but even that failed him. His mind was a blank. He felt like a singer who suddenly finds his voice failing. He had not yet learned that beauty often springs from sorrow, that despair often begets ecstasy.

VI.

As time went on he felt more lonesome, more isolated, more bored. He was invited to places but he found the people uninteresting. He was only enlarging his gallery of faces. They were all discussing the same subjects, repeating the same gossip, rehashing the same anecdotes. He was young, imaginative, and craved novelty; and he was too young to know that in his day, no different from the day of the King Solomon, there was nothing new under the sun. He had yet to learn that whatever new there is in life is in one’s own mind and that there are but few people in any generation who have mind enough to see it.

And what seemed to others complicated was so simple to him. People blabbed about religion, fought over theology, hated each other because of sect, as if these were vital principles of life while to him they were mere playthings, playthings for children. He could not grasp what the struggle was about. Though considered irreligious he loved the Bible and loved God as Spinoza had loved Him, as all people of real intellect loved Him. No other book was as precious to him as the Bible—he had read it over and over and was still reading it with refreshing joy, and its poetry, its allegories, its legends, its fables and parables, and its inundating beauty captivated his soul—but he found nothing mysterious in it except the mystery there was in all things beautiful. To him who sees clearly all things are simple. What were the Jesuits and the Lutherans and the Mendelsohnians and the Talmudists and the Kantians and the Fichteans—what were they all fighting over? Did any one really believe that God created the universe in six days? he asked himself time and again. Did any sane person earnestly claim the serpent myth to have been a real fact? Did any one earnestly believe the hundreds of allegories scattered throughout the Great Book to be actual happenings? Did any one believe in the historical parts in the Bible any more than in Persian or Grecian myths? Did any one entertain faith in the immaculate conception? Of course, he knew the ignorant and superstitious believed in fetishes, but he could not fully comprehend that the so-called enlightened sincerely believed in all these. He looked into his own mind and believed he understood all minds. He judged all minds by his own. At times, in his wanderings through the streets, brandishing his cane and smiling cynically, he said to himself that either he was an imbecile and did not possess the ordinary faculties of a human being or the world was peopled with idiots. There could be no compromise between the two; either he saw clearly or the millions of struggling bigots saw the truth. With the sublime self-assurance of youth he knew he was right and laughed pitifully at the erring souls around him. Yes, he understood Voltaire. Who would not laugh at the sight of an army of children dressed up in clothes of grown men and women? Who would not scoff at the prattling babes imitating the language of their elders? The children must have some things to play with or to fight over, he mused. Religion or War? Since the sound of cannon had ceased, the children of men now engaged with other playthings. When everything else fails religion supplies the demand for a universal plaything. War and Religion—he almost preferred the former. The ugly spectacle of Hamburg’s factionalism disgusted him. And whenever strife is ripe—he beheld all history at a glance—after every great war, after every economic upheaval, after every revolution, people turned against his race. He now understood why his people were called chosen.

His thoughts soon turned to Greece as one tired of a long winter in the north turns to the sunny south. Greece of old was the sunshine in his dreary existence. He could not understand the petty strife of the theology of his day but he grasped the meaning of Old Greece. The one was sordid prose, the other idyllic poetry. Prose must speak in exact terms, poetry may be fantastic. He yearned for deities rising from ocean waves, for a god on Olympus, for goddesses with harps and rainbows and vessels of nectar. The gods of Hamburg savoured of incense and garlic.

Hilda was to him what the deities were to the Old Greeks, an object of adoration. She was his Venus, a composite of all things beautiful, his illusion. In his present state she was the only drop of sweetness in his bitter cup. All his innate beauty-worship, and all his vision, was centered upon her. What attributes were not hers his fancy supplied. And the more hopeless his romantic fancy had become the more he craved her love—he loved to run after the retreating horizon. At times he would become vexed and swear that he would love her no more. Twice he had sent her poems and she had not even acknowledged them, yet he would send her another poem. It was a sweet lyric, the offspring of pure ecstasy. It had leaped into being like a bud bursting into bloom. For days he had hummed it to himself—stroked the petals—and finally dispatched it to her. He wanted her to know his great sorrow. He was sure she would understand him now. But like its predecessors, it remained unacknowledged and unanswered.

A few days later on his return from the midday meal, Aaron Hirsch came up to him, his perspiring face basking in a sunny smile. “I suppose you have dined with the family today.”

His voice was ingratiating. Albert looked puzzled.

“Were you not invited? Your esteemed aunt was here and your lovely cousin, Fräulein Hilda, and, I heard your esteemed uncle say they were going to have a little family dinner.”

Aaron clasped his little beard as if he were shaking hands with a dear friend as he proceeded, “Perhaps I should not have told you this, but you know it hurts me—yes, it hurts me to see you unappreciated. Of course, I did not dare say all there was on my mind but one day I said to your esteemed uncle—‘Herr Banquier’, says I, ‘that nephew of yours will yet do you great honor’, says I—these are the very words I said. I hate to flatter you but I told him a thing or two about you that did you no harm, for I know there are others—I’ll mention no names—there are others who whisper other things in your esteemed uncle’s ear.” And with a hushing movement of his hand he added, “You know the saying, ‘An ox has a long tongue but cannot speak.’ One must guard his bread and butter—I have a wife and seven children!” With a finger at his lips he made a helpless grimace.

Albert’s face clouded. He did not discuss his personal affairs with Aaron, though he often encouraged the little man’s monologues. Aaron appealed to his sense of humor. His expressions, his gestures, his comments, were mirth-provoking. Today he made no rejoinder. He wanted Hirsch to leave him alone. His aunt and Hilda visited the bank and had not taken the trouble to see him—Hilda, to whom he had sent his finest lyrics only a few days ago!

He rose from his work and, without saying a word to anyone, left the bank. He overheard Mr. Elfenbein mumble something about his idleness but he did not care. A thousand needles were pricking at the base of his brain. He could not stand still. With cane in hand he sauntered along the Jungfernstieg, listlessly watched the swans in the Alster basin, and finally landed in the Swiss Pavilion, Hamburg’s most festive café.

VII.

When he next visited his uncle’s summer home and met Hilda he sought in vain for a trace of self-consciousness in her countenance. She received him as cordially and as calmly as Aunt Betty. She inquired about his progress at the bank, whether he had made friends at Hamburg, quite indifferently. She smilingly “hoped” that his impressions of “the vulgar Hamburgers”—a phrase he had used—had changed. He scented a challenge in this remark and rushed to prove the assertion.

The conversation was soon interrupted. Aunt Betty joined them. And she usually managed to be around whenever Albert talked to Hilda.

One afternoon he spied Hilda alone.

He had been wandering around from ennui. He was almost sorry that he had come here. He found life here as monotonous as in Hamburg; at times even more so. There was here too much enforced etiquette and formality to suit his independent spirit. Here he was not himself. His uncle, his aunt, the guests—this time there were a few dignitaries, officials and such—everyone was so proper, the talk was so stereotyped, that he found himself in a state of boredom. Hilda was the only person to relieve the monotony, but she seemed hedged about on all sides. Boldly he made for where she was seated.

He felt that she knew of his approach, but she gave no sign, except that she appeared more absent minded than usual.

“Why do you avoid me, Hilda?” he begged. He did not realize that unto the lover that begs nothing shall be given.

“It’s best that I should.”

She was looking away from him. She was seated as if posing, her left elbow on her knee.

“Hilda, don’t my verses mean anything to you?”

“I like your rhymes very much—I have often wondered how you could think of all those rhymes—”

He was beside himself. So that was all his verses meant to her. They were well rhymed! They were mere beads strung on a string—not even a rosary!

“Why did you not write to me?—why didn’t you at least acknowledge the receipt of my poems?” There was a cry of humiliation in his voice.

She was silent for a moment. She knitted her brows as if studying how to put her thoughts into words. Then her face darkened; animation suddenly leaped into her sea-green eyes.

“And I have thought of you every moment,” he continued in a plaintive, reproachful tone, “and dreamed of you—and day-dreamed of you—” There was a spiteful smile around his lips as he added, “In my day-dreaming you could not shun me—you couldn’t push me away. You see, there is some advantage in being an imaginative poet even though you despise him—”

The color was rising in her face, her breast heaved. His words were like the suggestive passages in the novels she was forbidden to read but which she had read clandestinely.

“You must not say these things to me,” she presently said, catching her breath, her cheeks burning.

“Why shouldn’t I? I love you. I do not care who knows it. I lie awake in the darkness of my room visualizing your presence close to me. You can’t forbid my loving you—”

There were unshed tears in his half-closed eyes. There were tears in his voice. It was his vision, his words of despair, that brought the tears.

“How can you talk this way, Albert.”

Her voice was soft, caressing; there was tenderness—a soothing tenderness—in the manner she pronounced his name. “You know, it is—” she paused as if she could not utter what was in her mind—“You know it’s impossible—”

“Why impossible?” His voice changed quickly and he spoke rapidly, impulsively. “Impossible because I am a poor poet, because I have no gold to offer you, because—” He checked himself.

She was pensively silent, which gave him hope. On their way to the house she seemed more solicitous about the things that interested him.

That evening Aunt Betty was more demonstrative in her hospitality to him. She prevailed upon him to stay a few days longer, and he saw in this, too, a hopeful sign, He saw connection between her attitude and his talk with Hilda.

He spent a hilarious evening. He was his old self again, the loveable, witty boy whom the family had met in Gunsdorf a few years ago. Before he went to bed he wrote letters home. One to his mother, telling her of the wonderful time he was having at Uncle Leopold’s villa, and begging her to thank Aunt Betty for her many kindnesses to him; another to his sister, in which he guardedly told her of Hilda’s beauty and loveliness; and still another to his devoted friend, Christian Lutz. To him he poured out his whole heart. He told him of his great passion for Hilda, of the unmistakable signs of reciprocity, of his great happiness.

“Tell it not in Gath,” he wound up his letter in Biblical phraseology, “I am in love—madly in love. As the lily is among the thorns, so is my beloved among the daughters of Hamburg. Her lips are like a thread of scarlet and her neck—no, it is not like the tower David builded for an armory; it is white and firm; neither long nor short, a slender pedestal for the prettiest Grecian head. I charge you, ye son of Gunsdorf, by the roses of Sharon, by the lilies of the valley, that ye stir not my love till she pleases. Christian, dear, I feel like a drunken god intoxicated with the elixir of love, bidding all the angels of the heavenly choir to join me in singing ‘Hallelujah’. Hamburg does not seem as sordid as it did at first. If my present spirit continues I may even learn to love the sons of Hammonia. But don’t grow jealous. I shall never stop loving my Christian. You were my first love.”

“Yes, my good Christian, I feel like a good natured, maudlin sot, bursting with song. I should like to fling my arms around everybody’s neck and shower kisses upon every one in sight. I should like to hug the whole universe and bedew it with my tears of joy. For I have good reason to believe Hilda loves me.”

VIII.

He left more than elated. Unlike on the occasion of his first visit Hilda now treated him with manifest kindness. On the morning of his departure she let him kiss her hand without protest and he gazed into her calm clear eyes without embarrassment.

On his way back to the city he recalled every little incident, raked up every triviality—symptoms of her love, he called them—and with all the inductions and deductions of logic adduced conclusively that Hilda was as much in love with him as he was with her.

There was a mishap on the way. An axle broke and delayed the homeward journey several hours. The accident did not disturb him. He rather welcomed it. He was alone and while the driver went to the nearest village to get the axle repaired Albert stretched himself at the edge of a field of ripening grain and watched the colorful patches in the sky. In spots the clouds seemed piled upon one another, a heap of them, with protruding ends trimmed with saffron and jade, and some were like huge rugged castles, with many turrets. Soon his eyes were fixed upon one to the left. It was a long stretch of watery green with a number of peaks and lower down there appeared to be a row of windows. Yes, it looked like his uncle’s villa. In the foreground was the broad terrace, back of it the long doors and French windows, and farther back, higher up, was the roof. The last window to the right belonged to Hilda’s room. He gazed upon it intently and was conscious of a peculiar pleasurable feeling. And there, farther down, near the horizon was a cloud in the shape of the marble well, with sphinxes engraved on the side, and those streaks of light were like the poplars along the path leading to the beach. For a moment he was superstitious. That was a sign from heaven. He saw good omens in everything about him. A lark was rising, trilling short, sweet notes in his flight toward the clouds. The lark was himself.

Two young peasant women were walking past him with scythes and sickles slung over their shoulders. They were barefooted, bareheaded, with short skirts of unbleached linen and loose shirts that looked like, blouses. They glanced at him lying on his back, then looked at each other, and burst out laughing. The older one said something to the younger of the two who answered with a resounding slap on the older one’s back, and they both roared with laughter once more. He was conjuring up the image of Hilda when the last peal of laughter broke the spell. He looked around. The peasant girls halted in the adjoining field for work.

Soon they began to sing a peasant love song. Albert sat up and could see their movements through the ripe grain stalks in front of him—their coarse sunburnt faces, their naked feet with their splaying toes—their sickles making rhythmical music as they swished against the falling grain. He was vexed with himself for watching them—for permitting his thoughts to dwell upon them. He felt it a sacrilege to think of them and Hilda at the same time. Presently Hilda’s image faded, the clouds in the sky were nothing but meaningless vapor, and the blood in his heart was surging rapidly. He shuddered. He could not take his eyes off the stooped peasant girl, the younger one, who was only a hundred yards away from him. Ugly thoughts raced through his brain. Strange appetites stirred within him. He would dismiss them but he could not. She was singing a love song; and presently the other joined in. They were singing a peasant harvest song, laughing at the same time—

_“Bäuerlein, Bauerlein, tick! tick! tack!_ _Ei, wie ist denn der Geschmack_ _Von dem Korn und von dem Kern,_ _Dass ich’s unterscheiden lern’?_ _Bäuerlein, Bauerlein, spricht und lacht,_ _Finklein nimm dich nur in acht,_ _Dass ich, wenn ich dresch’ und klopf’_ _Dich nicht treff, auf deinen Kopf!”_

It was the younger of the two that was singing in a mimicking voice, the older one humming after her. The younger one was a girl of about seventeen—the same age as Hilda—but was sturdier, her neck was like “the tower of David builded for an armory,” her squinting eyes full of mischief.

He would not lie to himself; a power more overwhelming was drawing him to that peasant girl with the sickle, every movement of hers was another tug at his passions . . .

He rose to his feet and stretched himself. The sun was hot and the air was dry and the peasant girl—she had just straightened a bit, with the sickle in hand, brushing a few strands of hair from her face, and was about to bend down again when she caught his eye. She glanced at him slyly with her squinting eyes. Her companion was now at the other end of the field working industriously. Albert looked at her boldly, the blood in his heart pumping furiously . . .

The driver with the axle appeared in the distance. Albert shrank a step, trembling in every limb. He again threw himself on the ground. He would not be caught by the driver looking at the reaper. An undefinable shyness seized him. Lying on his belly, his head slightly raised, he was awaiting the approaching driver. He soon heard his footsteps in the distance—slow, deliberate steps coming nearer. The footsteps suddenly halted. Albert saw the driver near the reaper. He heard voices, low voices, of the driver and the girl.

“I’ll cut you—look out. I’ll cut you.”

It was the girl’s voice he heard. Albert peered through the stalks of grain, he saw without being seen, his blood rushing to his head. He heard a chuckle, the sickle dropped from her hand. She feigned to cry for help but in a voice he could scarcely hear; the other reaper worked steadily on at the other end of the field. The driver and the peasant girl were now hidden in the tall grain . . .

The driver soon returned to his horses, grazing by the wayside. He was a stocky man in the early thirties, with a red face and a forehead bloodlessly white from the pressure of his cap. His face was now of a deeper red, his eyes seemed bloodshot, and he was panting.

He busied himself with the cart.

“Oh, but she is strong,” he said, half to himself. Albert was watching the driver adjust the axle.

“Who is she?” asked Albert.

“Do I know? From the neighborhood!”

He emitted a little laugh and proceeded with his work.

Presently he and the driver were in the cart, the wheels creaking, the horses plodding along the road.

The peasant girl waved her sickle, the driver waved his whip, the horse started off at a livelier trot in a cloud of dust.

Albert leaned back in his seat, lost in thought. He was puzzled. He knew the driver had a wife and five children, yet passing a girl he had never seen before and desiring her he made her his without courting, without brooding, without dreaming and musing, without being troubled about the scheme of things. They loved, they hated, they killed (if their king told them to) and begot others like themselves.

He looked at the driver as if he had beheld him for the first time. The peasant’s face was now calm, its natural red, his bluish eyes had cleared; they were no longer bloodshot; he was looking blankly in front of him, with whip in hand, was looking over the horse’s head. He had evidently forgotten about the reaper. She was no more to him than the field of rye in which she worked, no more than the bread he had eaten that morning, the glass of beer he had drunk the day before.

Albert’s heart was filled with envy, envy of the peasant. He envied him because he was so unlike himself, always thinking, always speculating on what was right and what was wrong. Albert wondered if he could make a peasant of himself and stop thinking and brooding. His thoughts drifted, he thought of Elfenbein, of Rudolph, of the chattering Hirsch and of scores of other men and women he knew. None of them were like the driver, and he could not be like any of them either. He thought of his uncle—a shrewd banker, a charitable man, a noble soul—no, he could not be like him either. He thought of his own father—kind and weak and listless—no, he was different. A flock of migrating birds were over his head—a path of black dots against the blue sky; a cow by the wayside stretched her broad neck, parted her jaws, and emitted a hoarse “moo—oo!” The woods in the distance answered “Moo—oo!”; the horse clinked his hoofs against a chance stone in the sandy road . . .

Without knowing why, Albert’s heart was filled with sadness. He sighed audibly. He was depressed because he was unlike anybody and because he knew he could not be like anybody else. God had made him different, had made him a misfit, a round peg in a square hole. His thoughts wandered. No, he did not wish to be like anybody else. Yet he was vexed. He felt dreadfully alone. Had he not been afraid of the driver’s ridicule he would have wept aloud—because—because he was unlike anyone and did not want to be like anyone else. If only Hilda had loved him! It suddenly flashed upon his mind that she did not love him.

IX.

But the next week he was again hopeful, even confident, of Hilda’s love. He had written to her and she had answered him. Rejoicing!

His hopes were rising quickly. If only he could make her appreciate his poems! He felt that she disliked his verses. She did not seem to understand that the poems he had shown her were inspired by her and were meant for her eyes alone.

One day he felt the fateful moment had come. He was again at his uncle’s villa. It was early October, the family was preparing to leave for their city home. It was a gloomy day, gray clouds in the sky, winds chasing withered leaves against tree trunks and fences. Yet there was joy in his heart. Hilda had praised one of his poems. He hung upon her words as if they had emanated from the lips of the greatest critic.

“If you only knew how many more beautiful poems you could inspire me to write,” he was saying enthusiastically, with plaintive begging in his voice.

“How?”

She said this absently, between two numbers of embroidery stitches she was counting.

“By promising that you’ll marry me some day.”

She seemed caught unawares. She dropped a few stitches and seemed annoyed.

Her head moved from side to side without looking up. She seemed very busy with her needle.

“Can’t you even give me hope—in the distant future?”

The color in her cheek was rising.

“You mustn’t think of me, Albert,” she said, without raising her eyes. “It’s impossible.” The last few words were spoken under her breath, scarcely audible.

Silence. He did not plead, he made no attempt at persuasion. There was the finality of death in her tone.

He returned to the city in a state of utter hopelessness. Conquest was denied everywhere.

He imputed to her a thousand motives for rejecting him; he blamed his uncle; he saw his aunt at the bottom of it. His sorrow deepened as the days passed. He sat in his room and brooded and then wandered through the streets like a restless vagrant. He was telling himself he would never survive this blow, and out of his poignant pain and the anguish of his soul sprang verses of despair.

His agony had become unendurable. Nothing mattered now. He did not care whether he pleased his uncle; he did not care whether he stayed at the bank or was dismissed. His sorrow was unbearable. He had to talk, to some one about it. He finally unbosomed himself to his friend, Christian. It was nearly midnight, his tallow candle sputtering.

X.

Having finished the letter he left his room. He meant to take a stroll, as he often did late at night when despair seized him.

On his way out, Frau Rodbertus greeted him cheerily, “_Guten Abend_.”

“_Guten Abend_,” he returned sulkily, and was about to pass her.

“_Bon soir_,” another voice called.

He paused. He recognized the voice of Eugenie Chauraux, the girl of whom he had caught a glimpse on the first day of his arrival here. He had since met her a number of times. She was a frequent visitor at Frau Rodbertus’. He had often admired her luminous brown eyes and black hair and her beautiful hands. Her hands particularly attracted him. They were not small but owing to her long fingers they seemed like small palm leaves, and they appeared peculiarly soothing when shaking hands with her; in spite of her warm clasp her hand was cooling.

Eugenie always talked French to him. She had told him she was glad to find one who spoke her native tongue so well and that she detested the French spoken by most Germans. Albert was not averse to flattery. He had often remained chatting with her while the sly widow would steal out of the room and leave “the children” alone. Frau Rodbertus was childless and was very fond of Eugenie. She was also fond of her lodger. She mothered him, and he liked to be mothered. She would frequently scold him for his peevishness in a gentle, motherly tone and would cater to hi whims. At times he would act towards her as if she were his mother. If his handkerchiefs were not easily found in the proper place, or when he forgot to send his linen to the washerwoman, or if an expected letter had not come, he would storm like a spoiled child as if Frau Rodbertus were to blame, and she would laugh or scold him with maternal good nature.

She was sentimental, and when she learned that Albert wrote poetry she became even more solicitous and obliging. She had the tenderness and delicacy of a French woman. Her voice was soft, almost soothing, and when she would pucker her lips and turn upon him her large dark eyes he would at once become docile. And while he had determined to keep his poetic aspirations to himself—he had been warned by his uncle that publicity of this fact might hurt him in his standing as a young business man—he frequently forgot his resolution and spoke of his _Lieder_ to her. He even recited some of them to her. He had found in her an enthusiastic audience, almost as enthusiastic as Christian. And though he had abjured her not to divulge his secret he knew that she had spoken of his verses to Eugenie. The girl never made mention of it but he felt that she knew.

“_Bon soir, Mademoiselle_,” he said to Eugenie and was about to proceed.

Eugenie’s face was turned upwards, the candle light through the open door catching the light of her eyes. Albert hesitated in his step.

“It’s too hot to walk, Herr Zorn” said Frau Rodbertus.

“Just for a stroll and then to bed.”

“It’s too early for bed,” Frau Rodbertus said laughingly.

Eugenie’s eyes were upon him.

Albert sat down on the threshold next to Eugenie.

After a space Frau Rodbertus asked Eugenie to play something.

“It’s terribly hot, and too late,” pleaded Eugenie.

“It is never too hot nor too late for music,” coaxed Frau Rodbertus.

When Albert joined in the request, Eugenie rose promptly and in rising supported her palm against Albert’s knee. He was pleasantly conscious of the contact of her hand. As he rose to follow her into the house his erstwhile loneliness was robbed of its sadness. Without analyzing himself he felt the genial warmth of these two as contrasted to the frigid kindness of his relatives. The former were human, stripped of all artifice, the latter formal, studied, cultivated.

Albert had no trained ear for music but his knowledge of melody, like all knowledge that came to him, was intuitive. And although his preference for music was limited to vocal and the violin—the staccato-like notes of the piano never appealed to him—he had a keen appreciation of all music.

Eugenie played with feeling, her slender body swaying with the rhythm of the music, casting a shadow in the room which was brightened by only one candle. Albert found himself making mental notes of everything about her. Her body swayed with the pliancy of a sapling. The irregular features of her face blended into a harmony of their own. Her fine eyebrows sloped at the ends abruptly like Japanese eyes, her nose rather narrow which made it seem longer than it was, and the middle of her upper lip protruded like a half opened bud. When she opened her mouth it was the upper lip that rose with a sudden jerk upward, disclosing longish white teeth. Her laughter—for her faintest smile was a musical laugh—was confined to her eyes; sparks of sunshine danced in the iris.

He soon forgot all about his vexing thoughts. He had no thoughts. Seated indolently, with eyes almost closed, he yielded to the pleasure of the moment. He was half-dreaming, the music but vague, distant echoes in his ears. And Eugenie played selection after selection, without being urged, without even being asked. She seemed eager to play, to go on with the galloping of her emotions, like a frightened horse that goes tearing wildly through the streets. She never turned her eyes either way but sat bent over the keys, breathing fast as she played.

Frau Rodbertus, her arms folded, watched the girl’s glowing cheeks. She understood Eugenie. She had not yet forgotten her own youth, and those heavenly moments when one’s blood courses like sparkling Burgundy. She sat in the shadow, sat and sighed softly as she remembered those blissful moments of her own life, never, never to come back. No, she was not envious. The profligate liberality of the drunkard was in her heart. She soon tiptoed out of the room and into the courtyard, unnoticed by either Eugenie or Albert, and when the last note had died away, she breathed softly, her very being in suspense.

Eugenie at last rose from the piano and stretched her arms as if she were alone in the room: She barely looked in Albert’s direction.

“You play beautifully,” he murmured.

She remained standing in the darkened part of the room, beyond the circle of the dim candle-light, her fingers clasped in front of her, without moving.

He made another remark but that, too, remained unanswered. A few more silent moments. Neither moved. Albert was watching her silhouette, astir with semi-conscious feelings.

She soon passed him silently, her dress barely brushing his clothes. He rose and followed her in silence. Frau Rodbertus was not outside. The little courtyard was deserted—nothing but the lonely pine-tree in the centre casting an almost invisible shadow in the darkness. Not a sound anywhere. A voice from the street accentuated the stillness of the enclosed courtyard.

Eugenie re-seated herself on the door-step and Albert followed her example as if he were mimicking her. They heard footsteps inside the house, through the open door,—the soft, pattering, slippered footsteps of Frau Rodbertus—and soon the glimmer of the candle-light was gone.

Albert became more conscious of Eugenie’s nearness, of the torpid heat, of the intense darkness. Presently his eyes penetrated the darkness and he saw the outline of Eugenie’s face, loose strands of her hair breaking the curved lines. They sat for a few moments like bashful children brought together for the first time and left alone.

“It’s getting late—I must go home,” she soon said and rose abruptly.

He became conscious of his heart-beats. He did not rise. Something checked his voice.

She went into the house and he heard her calling “Good night” to Frau Rodbertus, who answered that she was coming down to accompany her home.

Albert jumped up and said he would see her home. Eugenie rushed up the stairs and some words were exchanged between her and Frau Rodbertus and she soon came down and accepted his proffered escort.

They walked through the courtyard gate silently. He wished to touch her arm, to help her across the step of the portal, but he was keenly conscious of diffidence and barely touched her elbow, quickly letting it go.

He grew more loquacious after they had covered some distance. He was telling her how much he admired the French and that he had loved them from his early childhood.

“My father hates the Germans,” said she with a nervous laugh. “He would like to go back to France but mother died last year and he has many debts in the city. As soon as he pays his obligations we’ll go back home.”

Albert insisted that one must hate no one.

“But you can’t love everybody.”

He agreed that one could not love everybody.

They were now passing through a main thoroughfare, encountering more pedestrians.

“_Guten Abend, Herr Zorn_,” a cordial voice addressed Albert.

He turned and saw little Aaron Hirsch, accompanied by his lean little wife. Aaron was walking in front, his hands behind, letting his gnarled cane drag over the sidewalk, his wife lagging half a step behind.

On his return home Albert made no light. He liked the darkness. His headache was gone, his bitterness departed, but he was sleepless. Eugenie’s presence had filled him with a pacifying joy. Something had stimulated him without irritation.

He soon found himself comparing Eugenie with Hilda and the difference in the atmosphere of their respective presences. Hilda was German, German to the core in spite of her Semitic blood. Her keen sense of caste, her haughty manner because of her father’s wealth, her materialistic outlook upon life, her lack of self-abandon—all the well-defined traits of the wealthy German, were easily discernible in her. Albert felt all this as he contemplated his beloved, and yet he was drawn to her. But her attraction for him was tantalizing, and made him restive, while that of Eugenie was free from this. Eugenie’s presence filled him with a pacifying joy, without irritation; it made him conscious of her charm without combative influences. He vaguely wondered if a man could love two women at the same time. Why not? One could love two children with the same devotion at the same time. And then one unexpectedly comes across an exotic flower—with the perfume and color of the tropics—and yet loves none the less the rose and the lily. If one loves the rose is there any reason why he could not at the same time love the lily? As he prepared to retire a fugitive memory flitted across his brain. Eugenie had said something about blue eyes. He was conscious of disappointment. For while his eyes appeared blue they were really greenish. He wondered if Eugenie was equally fond of greenish eyes.

When he was in bed, lapsing into sleep, Eugenie’s face was before him, and he remembered her laugh. Hilda never laughed so freely, so whole-heartedly; there was always restraint in her laughter as there was restraint felt in everything about her. He thought of warbling of a canary, the voice flowing joyously into the air. And he also liked the dancing sunshine in her eyes when she laughed. Every time her upper lip rose he felt a strong desire to kiss her on the mouth. And that hand of hers—those long, soft, cool, yet clinging, fingers! His last semi-conscious thought was of those clinging fingers . . .

XI.

“That was a pretty girl you walked with last evening,” Aaron Hirsch remarked, and, rolling his large gray eyes, emitted a cackle, “It takes a poet to know what is what—hey?”

This magpie repeated the same remark to Albert’s “esteemed uncle.” He only phrased it a little differently.

“Your esteemed nephew is rapidly learning the ways of Hamburg,” Aaron said to the banker, with a cringing, ingratiating laugh. “If you had seen him stroll along Beckerstrasse with a brunette on his arm you would have imagined him a born Hamburger.”

Leopold Zorn grew angry and sent Aaron about his business. A few minutes later he called him back.

“I meant no harm, Herr Banquier,” Aaron was making obsequious apologies. “May the Lord so help me, I meant no offense to your esteemed nephew. Far be it from me to even hint at any offense to the most remote relative of my benefactor. No, indeed. The girl he walked with was no hussy on the Jungfernstieg. She is a most respectable girl. That she is, Herr Banquier; I happen to know her father. I sold him a lottery ticket last year and he won fifty marks at the first drawing. A very honorable man is M’sieu Charaux—a relative of the widow Rodbertus—a very fine woman with whom your esteemed nephew is lodging. Indeed, the girl is a real lady—what people in your high social station would call a _Mademoiselle_. You need have no fear about your esteemed nephew—no, indeed; I keep my eye on him all the time. Blood certainly will tell. He is a well-behaved young man—a chip off the old block, as the saying goes.”

Admonishing Aaron not to discuss his nephew, the banker told him to keep his eye on the young man.

“That I will, sir,” Hirsch assured his patron.

XII.

Opening the door of his lodging a few days later Albert noticed Eugenie talking with Frau Rodbertus. They were in the little parlor. He wondered what they were always talking about, this young girl and that middle aged woman. He wished to walk past them, up the stairs, to his room, but the parlor door was open and he could not pass unnoticed. Besides, he was lonesome and liked to talk to them—to Eugenie. There was something about her that always caused his lonesomeness to disappear. With her he felt at home. She made him forget Hilda.

Eugenie was seated close to Frau Rodbertus, leaning affectionately against the older woman, the candle light flickering on a table close by.

They soon laughingly began to talk of love. Albert called it a malady, which, he declared, was in some cases incurable. The widow laughed indulgently, with the tolerance of older people for the sweet nonsense of the young. Eugenie’s eyes were serious and she vouchsafed no comment.

Frau Rodbertus was to have escorted Eugenie home but Albert would not hear of it.

He took Eugenie’s arm carelessly, without any timidity, without even feeling the tremor of her arm as he touched it. Eugenie was silent as they walked through the dark quiet streets. Presently her hand touched his, and he clasped it, feeling the fingers moist and cool, and he playfully straightened her fingers one by one without resistance from her. Her fingers were slender and soft, and he was conscious of a strong desire to carry them to his lips.

She did not permit him to take her all the way home. “You know my father is very strict and would be horrified if he knew I allowed you to walk home with me in the evening.”

They stopped a few doors from her house. She lived in a dark narrow street devoid of street lamps.

“You are so sympathetic,” he was saying to her, referring to her attitude rather than her words. She had extended her hand to him but he was in no haste to part. He could see her eyes in the dark. They were fixed upon his face sympathetically, and they were so close to each other.

Suddenly—he never could recall how it came about—his hands began to creep along her arms—they crept slowly, barely touching her sleeves, from the wrists upward—until the tips of his sensitive fingers felt the contact of her slender shoulders—he felt their smooth roundness, the yielding softness of the velvet garment over them—and then his arms entwined her. When their lips met she caught her breath with an involuntary little gasp—half sob, half cry, and clung to him grippingly for a moment but soon rested in his arms, scarcely breathing, with the stillness of death. For a bare second he was frightened. He could not hear her breathe.

“Eugenie,” he whispered. He now held her at arm’s length and peered into her face, but it was so dark that he could only see her dilated eyes. She was just staring at him, mystified at the first kiss from a man’s lips. “Eugenie,” he whispered again, but he only heard her catching her breath in response. He bent forward and kissed her moist slender fingers and bade her good night. Her fingers clung to him as they parted, almost drawing him back. “Good night,” he repeated. Her reply was no louder than her breathing.

They parted.

He walked away a few steps, turned around, and halted. He saw a shadow moving toward her house. When he saw the door open he walked away as fast as his legs could carry him, as if he were speeding away from a scene of crime. He also entered his room stealthily. And when in bed he tried to understand what had happened. It all seemed like a dream. He tried to persuade himself it was a dream. He was in love with Hilda. He was sure Hilda was the only one he loved. Then his mind recalled the scene of the reapers. Was he like the driver, that beast-like peasant? He sighed. He found himself pitying Eugenie—that sweet, gentle, trusting Eugenie—and despising himself. He hated himself. His eyelids were soon wet with tears, an unbearable pain in his breast. The thought of Eugenie wrung his heart; it gnawed at his brain. Albert was easily given to tears, and they now flowed freely. He wept for Eugenie. She was so pure, so beautiful, so tender, so sympathetic, and he treated her as if—as if she were a reaper in the fields!

What was pounding in his ears so clamorously? The dashing waves by the sea . . . the driver was kissing Hilda . . . What surprised him was that the sight did not shock him and he looked on and laughed; he was not even jealous; there was no resentment in his heart. He laughed and told Frau Rodbertus not to mind it—Frau Rodbertus, in her long gown and slippers, was seated in his lap and calling him sweetheart, and he was married to the widow . . . As he was trying to recall when he had married her Hilda and Eugenie came in, arm in arm. But how they were dressed! Barefooted, with short skirts of unbleached linen and loose blouses, like the reapers; and then Uncle Leopold—it was Uncle Leopold but he wore a beard like Aaron Hirsch—rushed in and waved a stick at him—the stick looked like an axle . . .

He stirred and said to himself he did not know why he could not fall asleep, then stirred again, opened his eyes and beheld day-light. He leaned out of bed, reached for his watch on a chair close by, and jumped out. He had overslept.

XIII.

Eugenie’s image persisted in intruding upon him. In fact, he found himself thinking more of Eugenie than of Hilda; there was more tenderness in his heart when thinking of Eugenie than when thinking of Hilda. And every time he glanced at that omnipresent Aaron Hirsch—Aaron Hirsch had again seen him with Eugenie—he thought of Eugenie. Aaron had said nothing to him about her but he could read something in his rolling, roguish eyes. While copying entries into the ledger he did it mechanically, his mind wandering in other regions. He was visualizing those sweet moments with Eugenie in the dark street and experiencing the sensation over again.

A few days later Albert was summoned to his uncle’s private room. Albert was in a grave mood because of the return of a few poems which he had sent to an editor at Munich.

He found Uncle Leopold at his secretary, austere and domineering.

“Take a seat.” He said this in a commanding tone.

Albert sat down, feeling the worthlessness of life more keenly.

“I have something of the gravest importance to say to you,” Uncle Leopold commenced, his eyes averted. He then paused.

Albert caught his breath and waited.

“It’s about your general conduct,” he snapped. “They tell me awful things about you.”

“I’ll try to be careful about my work in the bank,” Albert said contritely. For the moment Albert’s pride was gone. His pride would always sink with the rejection of his manuscripts.

“I don’t care so much about your work,” the banker said with an irritable wave of his hand. “These mistakes can be corrected. It’s your life mistakes. No one but yourself can correct those.”

The banker again paused. Albert looked at his uncle puzzled. He could not fathom the cause of the present complaint.

“You have been seen in bad company,” the banker resumed in a more serious tone. “The nephew of Leopold Zorn must not bee seen running around with dissolute women.”

“Uncle Leopold—that’s not true—it’s a base falsehood—I have kept company with no bad women—” he burst out indignantly, tears springing to his eyes. “Some one has been slandering me. I spend all my evenings reading and writing, save for a stroll now and then—someone has been lying to you.”

“No, the source of this information is quite reliable,” the banker continued in a milder tone, the tears in his nephew’s eyes instantly softening his feelings. “You were seen on Bleicherstrasse with a girl of questionable character.”

“That’s false, Uncle Leopold . . utterly false . .” tears stifled his speech.

He then remembered Eugenie and felt he had to defend her honor.

“I have never associated with any women here except with one of the purest souls I have ever known—as pure as my own mother—as pure as my sister—as pure—” He was about to add Hilda’s name but checked himself.

“One cannot be too discriminating,” Uncle Leopold said in a conciliatory tone, as if willing to let bygones be bygones, “but you must be more careful in the future. The walls have ears and the streets a thousand eyes. The nephew of Leopold Zorn must avoid all suspicion.”

“And the uncle of Albert Zorn ought not to lend ear to malicious tongues,” flared up the nephew, rising from his seat indignantly.

The false accusation and the insinuation against Eugenie’s character brought back his innate pride. His unshakable confidence in himself returned. There was insolence on the young man’s face.

Uncle Leopold caught the sudden change in his nephew’s face and smiled. He resented Albert’s impudent manner, but at the same time admired the young man’s fearlessness. He remembered the letter his wife had received from Albert in which he thanked her for her hospitality. Aunt Betty had expressed great admiration for the style of his language.

When the interview was over the banker rose from his seat and escorted Albert out of the door, his hand resting kindly on the young man’s shoulder.

EUGENIE.

I.

Dreary months followed. Aside from the great disappointment the climate contributed to his misery. The damp autumn, the cold early winter days, the northern winds were not to his taste. He was a child of sunshine, not a child of the mild sunshine of the Acropolis, as he thought he was, but of the burning rays baking the plains of Jehosophat, and the scorching heat of Jericho. Protest though he might, he was a child of Canaan. And everything around him was bleak and cold and dismal, and his heart was burning with a fire of its own, the blood in his veins seething tumultuously. He wrote much to give expression to his turbulent thoughts, walked much to dissipate his restlessness, and people called him an idler, a _Gassenjunge_! He did not care. He shunned people. He only wished to be a spectator of the passing show of life, and when the procession provoked laughter in him he laughed with the tears rolling down his cheeks. For there was pity in his laughter, but those around him only heard the laughter with no ear for the pitiful undertone.

Albert always hated Prussianism—he had learned to hate it in his childhood—and Prussianism was the spirit of Hamburg of that day. Brought up in a Rhenish town under French occupation it was inevitable that a boy with such keen sensibilities should perceive the difference between Prussian ponderousness and vulgarity and French sprightliness and delicacy. His present environment brought back to him his earlier perceptions.

Albert found himself pondering on Goethe and Lessing. In Goethe he saw the Spinoza of poetry. He understood what Herder meant when he said, “I wish that Goethe would for once take some other Latin book in hand besides that of Spinoza.”

The more he pondered on Goethe and Lessing and Spinoza the more he revolted against the Philistinism of his environment His unrequited love added bitterness. He saw the faults of the people around him with the eyes of an enemy.

And there was hatred all around him. Lessing’s preachments against hatred had made no impression upon his people. Indeed, they had erected monuments to his memory but went on hating more than ever. They wanted none of Lessing’s tolerance, none of the Pantheistic harmony of Goethe. They wanted strife. Not the strife that begets liberty—liberty of mind and body—but the strife that begets religious bigotry. Albert wanted to continue, and combine, the noble work of Lessing and Goethe. He wanted to teach his countrymen the truth of Lessing and the harmony of Goethe, but he was as yet too young to know that the reward for such efforts are loose stones during one’s life and stones cemented into the shape of a monument when loose stones can no longer do any harm.

He found himself like a nightingale in a crow’s nest. Every time he began to sing the crows caw-cawed; and the masses have always understood the caw-caw better than the song of the nightingale.

He was no philosopher content with metaphysical speculations. He was no Spinoza to be content to grind lenses and subsist on a penny’s worth of Dutch bread and raisins. Unlike the philosopher’s passion for abstract truth, truth was meaningless to Albert unless it colored human life. His asceticism was not that of the monk wilfully denying himself the pleasures of the body but rather that of the pleasure-seeking maiden who silently broods in her chamber because she was left out of a festivity. The world to him was a playground, and he wished to do part of the playing.

Of late he had tried to get his first poems published in book form but the publishers could see no merit in them. The verses were too simple to strike the publishers as extraordinary; and though Goethe had given them a lesson in simplicity the Germans were still too bombastic to appreciate any writing unless tumid. Albert felt that as soon as his poems were published the world would be at his feet. He had been to see a publisher who was specializing in books that provoked the censor, but as yet there was nothing in Albert’s poems to provoke any one except a lovesick maiden.

One day he decided to have his poems published at any cost, and show his uncle—and Hilda—that he was no mere clerk. But where could he get the money? He only received a salary sufficient for his board and lodgings. Besides, he did not know how to economize. He soon thought of the lottery, the living hope, and the despair, of his father’s existence. Perhaps he might win—somebody won at every drawing! One night he dreamt that he played the lottery and won. He thought this a good omen and the following morning gambled away his last _Pfennig_.

II.

Eager to have some of his poems published, and finding no publisher to risk his imprint, he sent a few verses to _Hamburg’s Waechter_, a newly founded periodical, whose secret aim was Jew-baiting.

The editor of this journal, one Karl Trummer, was one of those pen-patriots who abound in every land in times of great strife and who sell their pens to the highest bidder. After every war there is a feeling present that the bloodshed was useless, and every faction blames the other. In spite of Hegel’s saying that the only thing man learns from history is that he learns nothing from history, certain pen-patriots have learned that laying the blame at the door of one class satisfies all other classes—the same class that bore the brunt when wells were poisoned, when the Black Plague raged, when famine swept the land, when reason dethroned the idols of antiquity. The Jew has always been an atoning scapegoat.

Little thinking of the policy of this journal—thinking only of having some of his verses appear in print—and though concealing his identity under an ingenious pseudonym, the authorship of these ballads was soon learned, and Albert found himself more disliked than ever. He was regarded with contempt by the Jews and with indifference by his non-Jewish friends. And in order to make him feel the sting of their hatred the Jews belittled his talents. That _Gassenjunge_ a _poet_! they sneered. His language was so simple that a child—“even a maid servant”—could understand it! How, really, could one be a poet who could be understood by everybody?

Embittered he isolated himself altogether. He was in his room night after night, reading, writing, thinking. He paid no attention to Dame Gossip and her wagging tongue. Too many thoughts crowded his brain, too many conflicting opinions. For he read books on all sorts of subjects—poetry, philosophy, theology, tales, legends—and he never read passively. He either praised or condemned. And the books he read not only imparted to him the knowledge of the authors but, like narcotics, stimulated the intuitive knowledge within him.

When he casually did meet people he voiced his convictions too freely. He was still of an age when impressions were easily made and for the time they seemed indelible. He was impetuous, ardent, argumentative. He was witty and people liked to listen to him even though they hated him for his utterances. And when his convictions changed—as the convictions of liberal minds and those of sincere purpose must change—he gave frank expression to these changes. People called him fickle and thought him flippant, failing to realize the struggles of a soul in its efforts to adjust itself. He was likewise vacillating in his literary attempts. Before he fully developed one poetic theme another rushed upon him and he halted the latter for still another.

His presence in the bank had finally become a source of annoyance. Martin Elfenbein could hardly contain himself. In spite of frequent warnings Albert came and went whenever he pleased. Yet, no one dared discharge him.

At last the inevitable happened. He was advised that his services were no longer needed in the bank. No one was happier than Albert. He was glad to be rid of this place, no matter what the outcome might be.

But before long Uncle Leopold had established his nephew in a new business. Albert was conscious of his importance when he beheld the sign:

ALBERT ZORN KOMMISSIONGESCHAEFT

He was now a full fledged merchant, and he could come and go as he pleased without being eyed by that hateful Martin Elfenbein. And he did not owe a _Pfennig_ for his stock of goods. His quick-tempered but generous uncle, after reprimanding him for his past transgressions, had filled up the shop with cloth wares and told him everything was his providing he attended to business and managed to replenish the shelves with the money taken in.

The novelty of the thing stimulated his energies for a while. Besides, the odor of the bolts of new cloth, the color of the chintzes, the haggling of the customers amused him. At first everything amused him and appealed to his sense of humor. The manners and faces of the agents who came to sell goods, the people who came to purchase, were an inexhaustible source of fun to him. Human faces and figures always suggested to him various species of animals or grotesque subjects. In one he saw the face of an airedale, in another that of a rabbit, a bulldog, a calf, or some ludicrous physiognomy. The forms of other customers seemed to him to resemble numerical figures. As a result there was a never-dying smile on his face and something akin to mockery in his perpetually narrowed eyes. At times, however, he would forget his merchandise and indulge in conversation foreign to his business. All sorts of news was afloat in the air in those days—strange rumors from France, from Austria, from England and scores of new movements in Germany—and Albert gave free reign to his tongue. He made comments, coined epigrams, gave expression to cynical remarks, which were repeated in the Pavilions and, expatiated upon, were carried to his uncle.

Leopold Zorn had ordered Aaron Hirsch to keep his eye on his incorrigible nephew and make reports of the young man’s conduct, and while endeavoring to shield Albert, Aaron had “a wife and seven children” and had to do his duty.

Aaron’s reports were not encouraging. Not infrequently when Aaron called he found no one at the shop, the door unlocked, the proprietor away at the Swiss Pavilion. Aaron played pranks upon Albert and carried off numerous articles, which were undetected by the owner, until their return by the sly Hirsch.

What Albert could not understand was the unsolvable riddle at the end of six months; he had neither money nor merchandise and no one owed him anything! He put the problem up to Aaron but instead of explaining the situation Aaron laughed until tears rolled down his bearded cheeks.

“It’s a great mystery,” Albert said with mock gravity. “Perhaps a Kabbalist might be able to bring Elisha back to life, and the prophet, who could fill barrels of oil from an empty jug, might stretch a yard of velveteen into a thousand bolts.”

When laughter subsided Albert produced a few sheets from his breast pocket and read a few of his latest verses.

“Ah! if I could put these on the shelves!” he sighed.

III.

As most people in sorrow and affliction turn to prayer Albert turned to love. He could be without friends, he could endure mental anguish, but he could not bear life without love.

Of late many things had troubled him. His father was making preparations to leave Gunsdorf and his mother’s letters lacked the usual ring of cheer. His sister, too, seemed weary of the life in her native town and frankly hinted that she would welcome a change. He had gradually become estranged from Uncle Leopold’s house and from the class of people that visited there and shunned all other associations, save the dilettantes in the Swiss Pavilions who sat all day drinking beer and talking grandiloquently of art and literature. But before long he tired of these, too. He fathomed their depth. He was lonely and craved affection, and his thoughts turned to Eugenie. He had not seen her for some time, as her father had moved to a farm about five miles from Hamburg, and her visits at Frau Rodbertus’ were rare. He now yearned for Eugenie and reproached himself for his neglect of her in the past. He knew Eugenie had loved him and wondered if she still loved him.

One summer day he took a stroll on the road between Winterlude and Ohlsdorf. He was going to find her and yet sauntered along the road as if he were just walking aimlessly for the sheer pleasure of movement. It was a warm day and the road was white with dust. A dog barked. Albert turned around and saw a large dog harnessed to a small cart, barking as he pulled his load. Alongside the cart, on which stood a large empty milk can, was a girl, with a kerchief overhead arranged in the shape of a hood. The girl turned around when the dog began to bark, glanced in Albert’s direction, and proceeded on her way. The next moment she turned in his direction again and he saw a pair of large brown eyes under the hood-like kerchief. His heart fluttered, noisy crickets chattered in a nearby field. A bird called from a clump of bushes not far off. The muffled beats of flails came from a barn close to the roadside. The girl did not turn her head but plodded on alongside the little cart. Soon the road forked off to the left and the girl turned her head again toward him.

“Eugenie,” he called.

The dog emitted a loud, hollow bark and the empty can rattled against the sides of the little cart.

The girl hesitated, paused, and turned around, the dog hurrying ahead of her toward the farmhouse.

“Eugenie!”

Albert’s voice was jubilant, ringing with surprise, as if the meeting was wholly accidental.

With a quick movement of her left hand she jerked off the handkerchief, facing him with dilated eyes in which was a strange light.

She did not extend her hand to him.

“Frau Rodbertus had told me you were on a farm,” he broke the silence, intimating that it was not chance that had brought him here.

A softer light stole over her face, her protruding lip curled upward, disclosing her longish white teeth.

“I haven’t seen Frau Rodbertus in months,” Eugenie said, standing before him with her arms hanging on either side of her, the kerchief in her left hand.

Albert studied her a moment. The freedom of bygone days was gone. He felt constraint and sensed her constraint.

The dog had reached the gate of the farmhouse and stopped, barking, his head turned in the direction of Eugenie.

“You see, he is scolding me for lagging behind,” she said, indulging in a spontaneous smile.

“He is scolding you for your failure to offer hospitality to the weary wayfarer,” Albert answered in kind.

They both laughed.

“All wayfarers, weary or otherwise, are welcome at our house,” she said, turning into the passage that led to the farmhouse.

When they reached the house, Eugenie’s father, with rake in hand, was cleaning up the rubbish in front of the house. He was a little man, with a round face, a small tuft of hair under his lower lip, and a soft look in his round eyes such as only Frenchmen possess. He halted and glanced up suspiciously at the young man who followed his daughter into the yard. M. Chauraux was suspicious of all Germans, in spite of his sojourn there for many years.

Eugenic introduced Albert to her father, who acknowledged the introduction grudgingly. He showed only such cordiality as his native manners and politeness compelled, mumbling a few words in broken German.

“The gentleman speaks French, papa,” Eugenie struck in cheerfully, “and he loves the Emperor as much as you do.”

The Frenchman’s eyes turned with a bright flicker and, forgetting that he had just shaken hands with the stranger, clasped his hand once more. Then a mist appeared in the little man’s eyes and he sighed, muttering under his breath, “The Emperor!”

“No one loves the Emperor more than I do,” returned Albert.

“Have you ever seen him?” There was ecstasy on the Frenchman’s face.

“I see him now—I see him all the time—” cried Albert with boyish rapture. “I see him seated on a small white horse, holding the reins in one hand and gently stroking the horse’s neck with the other, riding slowly along the linden-flanked lane of the Hofgarten in my native town—Ah, the Emperor!” Mist also appeared in Albert’s eyes.

Saddened silence. Two speechless individuals with drooping heads. The Emperor was a captive on a barren island far removed from his worshippers.

Eugenie did not think of the Emperor. She was too happy to think of anything save of the cordiality between her father and Albert. Her father was very strict and never permitted her to form any friendship with young men. When the “time” would come he would find the proper “parti” for her, was his way of thinking. And he guarded jealously the most trivial flirtation on her part. He knew nothing of what had passed between his daughter and this young man beyond the fact that he was a lodger whom his daughter had once met at his relative’s home and that he happened to meet Eugenie on a chance stroll in this vicinity.

It was about two o’clock and Albert was invited to have a meal with them. There were very few words exchanged between Albert and Eugenie. All the talk was between her father and Albert—about the Emperor.

M. Chauraux did not mind his daughter’s accompanying the young man for a little distance. They had had a bottle of Burgundy between them and the young man admired the Emperor. The Frenchman had become quite loquacious and invited Albert to come again—any time whenever he could spare an hour from his business. Who could tell? The young man talked so well, seemed so prosperous, and loved the Emperor so much!—Who could tell? He might be a proper _parti_.

M. Chauraux’s regard for Albert increased when, several days later, the young man read to him a poem about Napoleon. The Frenchman did not quite grasp the verses in German but when Albert gave him the substance of it in French and then read the original to him, with unshed tears in his eyes, he even understood the German.

The young poet declaimed his verses with passionate abandon, music in his voice, tears in his eyes. The eyes of M. Chauraux, too, were clouded, the tuft of hair under his lower lip quivered, and he shook his head and sighed and murmured “_Mein Kaiser, mein Kaiser gefangen!_”

M. Chauraux wiped a tear away. Who could tell? This young man, though not French, certainly loved the Emperor, and was evidently not averse to Eugenie—yes, he might be a proper _parti_ for Eugenie.

One day, when Eugenie came into the house, having escorted Albert down the road, her father was seated at the table—there was only one table and one room which served as dining and living room—his arms resting upon it, as was his wont; his bushy eyebrows frowning as if he were working on a hard puzzle; his eyes staring in front; his short, stubby fingers drumming absently upon the table. He glanced at his daughter and noticed the expression of exultation on her face.

“A talented young man, hein?” said the father, without removing his arms from the table, and looking directly at her.

“Yes, he is,” Eugenie replied demurely, as was becoming a virtuous girl when her father makes reference to a young man.

“Very talented—very,” he repeated and turned in the direction of the window to his left. “Not a bad sort.”

Eugenie was silent and began busying herself with some household duties.

“_Mein Kaiser, mein Kaiser gefangen!_” hummed M. Chauraux, nodding his head sorrowfully and lightly tapping the table with the tips of his fingers.

“He might make a good husband for some nice girl,” the father said apropos of nothing a little later.

Eugenie was scouring a copper kettle and her head lowered as she applied herself to the utensil with more determination, without making any comment.

A girl should not be too frivolous, mused M. Chauraux, but still Eugenie ought not to be that bashful. She could at least encourage the young man, he said to himself, and take a little interest in him when he comes to the house. So far the conversations in the house were invariably carried on between the men, and always about the Emperor.

“You are past eighteen, my child,” he presently addressed his daughter, “and if the right young man would come along I should like to see you married.”

He rose from the table and came close to her. Eugenie, her face reddening, did not raise her eyes.

“You like Monsieur Zorn—hein?”

The scouring sound was the only reply.

M. Chauraux was puzzled. He could not quite reconcile her blushes with her silence. She never did care for the German young men, he said to himself.

“He is so different from the other Germans,” the father pursued the same object, flattering himself on his ingenious probing.

“Yes, he is different.”

M. Chauraux walked out of the house in a reflective mood. When a girl thinks a young man different from other young men she might be in love with him. Yes, he might be a good _parti_.

IV.

Weeks passed on, happy weeks for Albert. His stock was dwindling, so was his money, but what did he care? M. Chauraux made no objections to his frequent visits at the farm and at intervals Eugenie, on the pretext of visiting her relative, came to the city and met Albert. Eugenie, too, was happy. They were now avowed lovers, and nothing else mattered. The fact that her love was clandestine added zest to her passion. For while her father approved of Albert as a suitor properly chaperoned by himself, she realized what would happen if he learned of their intimacy in his absence. And when Albert and Eugenie were alone they never discussed the future. The present was enough for them.

But Albert’s happiness never did continue long.

One day Aaron Hirsch—the faithful Aaron—entered the private office of his master, with a woe-begone expression on his countenance and emitted a half-stifled sigh.

“Herr Banquier,” he addressed the banker, with a wave of his hands, “something must be done before it’s too late—I mean about your esteemed nephew. I have kept my eye on him as I was bidden but now I am obliged to bring to you a matter of grave importance.”

“What is the young scamp up to now?”

“A young scamp he is not, Herr Banquier.” Aaron gave a soft laugh and rubbed his hands obsequiously. “But a young man is a young man and his mind naturally turns to girls as the sunflower turns to the sun.” He emitted a cackle and wiped his lips with the palm of his right hand.

“What is it?” Mr. Zorn was impatient.

“It’s still the matter I spoke to you about some time ago. The Frenchman’s daughter. Well, Herr Banquier, a young man is a young man and a girl is a girl—a—you see—a—it might be too late—” He gave a helpless shrug of his shoulders.

“Does her father know of this?”

“This is what I have come to tell you, Herr Banquier. The other day I drove down to Monsieur Chauraux’ farm on the pretext of selling him a lottery ticket and incidentally pumped him about his daughter’s relations with your worthy nephew. He thinks the young man is going to marry his daughter—”

“Why didn’t you tell him Albert is living on my charity?” burst out Leopold Zorn.

“Yes, Herr Banquier, I did hint to him that the young man has nothing beyond that his philanthropic uncle sees fit to give him. Perhaps I should have alluded to the difference in their religions.” Aaron looked up at his master inquiringly.

“Religion or no religion, the scamp has no intention of marrying her. Go and tell him that.”

“I hope it’s not too late.”

“Then don’t stand jabbering here. Go over at once and see the Frenchman again.”

“Yes, Herr Banquier, I know where I can get a vehicle and can go at once—I hope it’s not too late—I saw him with her at the Swiss Pavilion yesterday—Yes, Herr Banquier, I can get a vehicle around the corner and go at once,” Aaron repeated as he humbly bowed out of the banker’s presence.

A few days later Albert approached the farmhouse with bouncing joy in his heart. He had told Eugenie at their last rendezvous in the city what time he would get to the farm and she was to meet him at a little grove about half a mile from the house. Eugenie was still feigning bashfulness in her father’s presence.

It was early autumn, heaps of dead leaves in the grove. Albert pondered at her absence. On other occasions he had found her standing near a silver birch waiting for him or concealed in a clump of underbrush playing hide and seek with him. He loved those tantalizing moments, running this way and that, punctuated by her silver laughter, and when he would catch her, panting and out of breath, he would clasp her in his arms and kiss her throat and lips and hair. The partly denuded trees now disclosed her absence at a glance. He stood still and waited. Then he stepped out in the open and looked down the road but she was not in sight. His eagerness made him nervous. She had never failed in their appointments. When he had approached the grove blissful expectancy was in his breast, and the disappointment was doubly provoking. Then fear possessed him. She might be ill.

After a space he strode toward her home. It was a one-story, straw-thatched cottage, and as he entered the little yard he looked at once at the door and at the two little windows on either side. No one seemed around.

Albert rapped on the door. He heard a voice within. It was M. Chauraux’s voice; his voice in anger.

He rapped again.

Silence.

Albert’s heart throbbed with misgivings.

Again he knocked.

The door soon opened with a rapid movement, M. Chauraux on the threshold with a forbidding look in his round brown eyes.

Albert greeted him with his usual cordiality but with a fast-beating heart.

M. Chauraux’s eyes moved from side to side, the tuft under his lower lip projecting ominously.

“Is—is Mademoiselle Eugenia unwell?” Albert stammered.

M. Chauraux stepped forward and closed the door behind him.

“I can’t allow you to see Eugenie any more,” said the irate father brusquely.

“But——”

“I want no arguments,” M. Chauraux resumed harshly. “And no letters—they won’t be delivered to her—no more clandestine rendezvous—you hear? I have had enough trouble with the police and want no controversy with your banker uncle.”

And without further explanation he entered the house and slammed the door.

Albert walked away, and reaching the gate turned around and looked at the window but he only saw the reflection of the gray autumn sky in the panes. He turned into the road and walked slowly back, with measured steps, striking with his cane at the wilted leaves on the ground and at the little stones by the wayside. Was there ever an Adam who was not driven out of the Garden of Eden on some pretext or other, Albert mused bitterly. What was his alleged sin? He could not tell, he could not divine. What had suddenly turned M. Chauraux against him? Albert could not account. He did not doubt Eugenie’s love. When he reached the grove he paused. Every tree, every grassy spot was full of sweet memories. He sighed. Sweet memories belong to old age, they are the white mile-stones long passed and glistening in the distance. For the moment he felt aged, an unfortunate Atlas, with the world of sorrows on his back——

“_Ich Unglücksel’ger Atlas! eine Welt,_ _Die ganze Welt der Schmerzen, muss ich tragen._”

Yes, he felt as if the whole world of sorrows was on his back, bearing the unbearable, with a mortifying pain in his heart. He had insisted upon either eternal bliss or endless misery—no compromise—and since eternal bliss was denied him misery was the only alternative. He settled upon a tree stump nearby lost in brooding reflections. He felt the weight of life heavily upon him, it was crushing him. He could not think of life without the sweetness of love, and that seemed to have been taken away from him for ever. All events seem final to youth.

Time was passing. He could not tear himself away from this place, from where he could see the straw-thatched roof in the midst of a cluster of leafless trees. He could see the path daily trodden by her feet, the underbrush that touched her skirt. How could he go on living without the lustre of her eyes, without the clinging contact of her hands, without the sweet warmth of her breath?

Before he realized darkness had come and the moon and stars appeared. He had never seen the lights of heaven look down so sadly. Were they, too, lovelorn?

With sudden determination he rose and walked back to the farmhouse, nothing definite in his mind. The gate was ajar and there was no light in the house, the pallor of the moon falling upon the window-panes. The window to the left was her window, a few feet away from her bed. Here he stood, gazing lovingly upward. He rose on his tip-toes and his face was on a level with the bottom pane. He gently tapped on the glass but no one stirred within.

“Eugenie,” he murmured, “Eugenie!”

No one appeared at the window, no one but the moonlight over his shoulder.

He removed his diamond ring—his mother’s heirloom—and scratched on the pane before him, “_Moi je n’existe que pour vous aimer_.”

He paused, a sad smile on his face, and turned to the road.

A peasant was driving by. Albert asked for a lift. “Hop in,” said the peasant hospitably, “I am going all the way to the city.”

An hour later Albert was on the Jungfernstieg. The lane was crowded with promenaders, the moon seemed to shine more cheerily here, the stars twinkled brighter. With his head lifted there was abandon in his gait. Girls walked past him with luring glances but he only smiled and walked on. Presently he was in front of the Apollo Hall, ablaze with a thousand candles, astir with a thousand voices. The Apollo was a gay place. The blowing of trumpets reached his ears, the rattling of drums, the sounds that stir the blood of youth. His steps halted.

“Do come in for old times’ sake!”

Some one had arrested his arm.

And from the Apollo came the blowing of trumpets, the rattling of drums, the sounds that stir the blood of youth . . .

V.

Winter had come and gone. A bleak day in March. Wind, sleet, a drab sky.

In a little shop in Beckerstrasse, in Hamburg, a young man, with pale cheeks and light brown hair and narrowed eyes, was seated before a little table heaped with bills, invoices, and dunning letters. Some of these reminders of indebtedness, were unfolded before him, others were on a spindle, and still others were unopened. Why open letters when one knows their contents? With hands stuck in his trousers’ pockets, his legs extended under the table, the pale young man looked forlorn. He seemed at once reckless and bewildered, sorrowful and carefree. There was mist in his eyes. The postman had just handed him a letter from his father. Not a line from his mother. “How did it all happen?”—was the import of his father’s letter. How did it all happen? Figures had always been the bane of Albert’s existence and to answer this question one must deal with figures. A bitter smile suddenly appeared on his sensitive lips, and his eyes narrowed still more—mere fine lines of indefinable color. How did it all happen? A memory from his school days flitted across his brain and his smile was bitter no longer. “When you grow up,” his mathematics teacher had told him, “you’ll have to have some one else to count your money for you, or you won’t have any.” And striking him with a lead-edged ruler the teacher had made the announcement emphatic.

The young man threw his head back and laughed as he remembered the incident. Soon he forgot his father’s letter and that vexing question, forgot the bills and invoices, and his mind lingered upon his early school days. He had always hated those school days, but now there was a yearning in his heart for the teachers and text-books and for—yes, even for the lead-edged ruler and gnarled stick. What if some stupid monk had struck him with a ruler or cane? Those were happy days, when one was not worried about paying bills and about letters that demanded how it had happened! He sighed deeply and stretched his arms yawningly upward. “Those were happy days,” he repeated to himself.

His eyes dropped upon his father’s letters before him. He became irritable and vexed. He had thrashed it out with his uncle and now his father had started all over again. “What will become of you, Albert?” his father had added. “You are already in your twenty-second year and have failed in everything—in everything. You have not only brought ruin upon yourself but also upon your poor old father. For I am getting old, Albert, and instead of my supporting you, you should take care of me. And at my age I am now obliged to leave here and start over again at some other town. I can read between the lines of your uncle’s letter that your conduct in other respects has not been irreproachable.”

He pushed the letter away from himself. He was growing angry with his father, with his mother, with his uncle. Why had they pressed business upon him? They had known he had no taste for business. What right had they now to complain?

He rose from his seat and paced the floor. He did not blame himself any longer.

He locked the door. With the door locked he felt secure from disturbers. Then, taking out a few sheets from his breast pocket began to scan an uncompleted poem. Presently he replaced the sheets, uninvited thoughts intruded upon him. His erstwhile cynical look faded. His eyes closed and he heaved a sigh. The thought of his family moving away from Gunsdorf pained him. His family had lived in Gunsdorf all their lives, and now they must move to a little village. He blamed Nature for all their misery. Who knows, he mused, Kant may be right. There was no guiding Providence. How could there be with so many rascals inheriting the earth? What a stupid world to believe in a guiding Providence! Or was Providence stupid?——

The door rattled, the lock was tormented, but he hated to turn around to see who the disturber was. Everything around him was so misguided, he mused.

“Open the door!”

It was the voice of that magpie, Aaron Hirsch. He was fond of Aaron and jumped up to open the door.

“You can’t do business with the door locked,” laughed Aaron.

“Just as much as with the door open,” Albert replied in a challenging voice.

Aaron laughed good naturedly, unbuttoning his coat, heaved a long drawn sigh, and asked, “How is business?”

“An ingenious question? Oh, business is wonderful—simply wonderful—can’t you see? I have sold every bit of my stock——”

Aaron laughed.

“What’s the good word from Uncle Leopold?——”

“I am coming on no mission from him,” Aaron rejoined, shrugging his shoulders as if the mere thought of it was foreign to him.

“Aaron Hirsch, for this falsehood you’ll have to fast two Mondays and two Thursdays, and at that I am sure on the Day of Judgment, when you’ll begin to tell all the good deeds you had done in this world, a seraph will rush in, clapping his wings, and will halt your entering through the gates of heaven because you had lied to a poor innocent earthly poet.”

“You are too good to hold this against me,” laughed Aaron.

“No, I won’t. No sooner will that denouncing seraph have spoken when I will gallop in on a fiery steed and say, ‘Lord of Hosts, poor Aaron only lied because he wished to preserve a wife and seven children from starvation.’ Whereupon the Lord of Hosts will brush the seraph aside and say, ‘Let him in. It’s no sin to lie for one’s wife and seven children,’ and will praise you before the sun, the moon and all the shining stars, and will appoint you an angel of the First Grade, with the right to wear wings of the color of the Swiss Guards.”

Aaron “hi-hi’d,” and “ha-ha’d” and “ho-ho’d” and ended with a shriek of uncontrollable laughter.

“If you’ll permit me to light my pipe,” Hirsch said a moment later, as he stuck the bowl of his pipe into the mouth of his leather pouch, “I’ll tell you the truth, though I have given my word to your uncle not to tell you this. But remember, your uncle must not know that I told you or——”

“I understand, your wife and seven children—”

“Well, sir,” continued Hirsch, “your esteemed uncle has instructed me to find out the exact amount of your indebtedness and how much you owe for your board and lodging. And he wants you to come and see him tomorrow before noon—but not a word of what I told you about paying your debts.”

VI.

Hirsch soon left and Albert was again alone. He dreaded the meeting with his uncle. If he could only check himself and let his uncle’s storm blow over, but he insisted upon arguing, trying to convince his uncle that he, Albert, and not the banker, was right. A gleam of hope appeared on the horizon. Uncle Leopold had hinted at paying him a stipend if he would go to the university of Bonn or Goettingen and continue his studies.

What studies? What profession would suit him? His first thought was of medicine, the career of his grandfather and of his Uncle Joseph, but he hated medicine. Besides, Albert was not blind to his shortcomings. An exact science was not for him. Anatomy, Materia Medica, Physiology, Chemistry—his head began to ache at the very thought of committing formulas and definitions to memory. What other profession was open to him? He smiled as he recalled Father Schumacher’s advice to his mother. Yes, student life in Rome appealed to him. The robe of the priest might even be becoming to him. He visualized himself in the black robe of the priesthood and a humorous smile spread over his countenance. He had read the “Decameron” and had also heard not a few delectable yarns about priests. And he recalled the pretty face of a nun with downcast demure eyes. And the blue skies of Italy and the dark skinned maidens of Tuscany—many fantasies leaped into his brain, alluring fantasies. The priesthood seemed to him an ideal career for a poet. He always loved mythology, and, after all, he continued in the same musing vein, Catholicism was the new mythology. The Immaculate Conception, the Virgin, the Man God, the Crucifixion, the Altar, the Incense—mythology of another age. What difference did it make whether God is one, Three or a Million? The Children of Men must have toys to play with, and one is as good as another. Toys never last long. The children play with them a while, destroy them, and cry for more toys, which, in turn, are broken and replaced by others. The Persians found amusement in one kind of toy, the Jews in another, the Greeks in still another, and then the Romans, and so on until the end of time. Conversion? Albert laughed as this term passed through his mind. It had always been so odious to the Jews, and was also odious to him, but now he laughed at the thought of it.

The day drew to a close. He rose, put on his hat and topcoat, locked the shop, and walked aimlessly along the streets, still musing and thinking. His thoughts were soon arrested by the procession of _Judenhetzers_ singing an obscene song. His idle musing stopped.

All thoughts fled from his mind. He felt as if some one had suddenly gripped at his heart and wrung every drop of blood from it. And he, too, moved along, the very poignant pain propelling him onward. People in the procession saw him but no one took him for one of the Chosen. His blond hair and proud bearing saved him from personal molestation.

The following morning found Albert in bed, suffering from a painful headache, needles pricking at the base of his brain. The good Frau Rodbertus applied compresses to his head and attended him with maternal tenderness.

“Too much reading and writing, Herr Zorn,” she spoke solicitously and passed her hand soothingly over his disheveled hair and feverish brow.

“_Nein, liebe Frau Rodbertus, zu viel Christliche Liebe_, (too much Christian love),” he murmured, a strange smile stealing over his wan features.

Frau Rodbertus smiled, too. She took him literally and, waving an admonishing finger at him with scolding playfulness said, “The girls will be your ruination if you don’t take better care of yourself.”

VII.

Later in the day he penned the following letter to Christian:

“My dear Christian:

“It seems I never write to you unless I am either in the seventh heaven or in the depths of hell. However, just now I may be only in purgatory. Who knows? But today I am angry, cross, furious; my wits are in mourning; the wings of my fancy are clipped. I am a blind Samson in the midst of jeering Philistines, with no pillars to pull down on my enemies. I have wound up my _immense_ business, or rather it has wound me up. Please don’t laugh. I have risen in the world. Very few have achieved the state of bankruptcy at my time of life. It’s quite a distinction, you must own. Well, you always did prophesy greatness for me. But my good uncle has paid all my obligations so my fame as a bankrupt won’t be of long duration.

“What a life I have led the past twelve months? God and Satan strove for my soul and in the conflict tore it to shreds. My inner life has been continuous brooding over the depths of the world of dreams, my outer life wild, cynical, dissolute, hateful. Yes, _amice_, at last I understand heaven and hell—with special emphasis on the latter. I am sure when I die I shall be appointed chief guide in hell, for I am familiar with every road and byway of the subterranean region, and could teach Dante a thing or two. Of course, my good Christian will have no occasion to meet me in Gehenna. I am sure Saint Peter will open the gates of heaven for you at the first glimpse of your benevolent countenance, but, then, I will interrupt the saintly doorkeeper and ask permission to show you _my_ dominion first. Who can tell, you may be just in time to see Lilith and her bevy of sporting witches go bathing in the Styx, and I give you my word you shall not be hurried.

“But I do have good news for you. I shall soon leave for Cuxhaven, where the doctors assure me the sea baths will restore my health, which has not been of the best. And the thought of leaving this hateful city already makes me feel refreshed. I detest this place and the people—everybody, everybody. I am sick at heart. You can readily understand my state of feelings that aside from my own grief—the grief of my many dismal failures—my blood is boiling within me at the memory of an ugly spectacle I witnessed the other night. It is too painful to speak of it; the iron has entered my soul; everything within me has turned to gall. The ‘Baptised traders’ here have launched a fierce attack against the _Un-Baptised_. The irony of it! The pot calls the kettle black. Those hideous cowards! You know me well enough that I am no more blind to the shortcomings of the Jews than any Christian, but when I see those selfish, cruel monsters revive the barbarism of the Middle Ages my heart cries in anguish. Those barbarians! In one breath they boast that they surpass the English in commerce, the French in art, the Greeks in philosophy, the Romans in warfare, and in the very next breath clamor that unless the progress of the Jews is checked the Teuton will be exterminated! Those miserable cowards! Twenty millions of these superior beings afraid of a handful of Jews! It would be laughable were it not so tragic! But I can’t speak of it, I can’t think of it—

“But wait, the day of reckoning will come. Before they have shaved my locks and put my eyes out I will tie firebrands to the tails of these foxes—you remember the story of Samson and the Philistines?—Yes, I will smite them hip and thigh, but not with the jawbone of an ass; a goose quill is my weapon.

“Did I say I was unhappy? I am to leave this cursed city, which holds for me nothing but the bitterest memories. So I will go to Bonn.

“O, what a comedy life is!—But enough! From the depths I call to Thee, Oh, Lord!

Albert”

VIII.

A mid-April day, rather warm for the season. The sunbeams were playing around the slender spire of the Petrithurm at Hamburg, with sparkling flashes at the bluish surfaces of the calm waters of the Alster.

At the curb before one of the houses on Grosse Bleichenstrasse stood a blinking horse, harnessed to a cart, a driver fidgeting with whip and reins. Soon the portal of the courtyard opened and from it emerged a strapped black leather valise, then a little squatty man, then a slender young man of medium height with small greenish eyes and light brown hair, carrying a cane and an umbrella in one hand and in the other a small bundle.

The older man placed the valise in the cart, the younger one threw in the bundle, umbrella and cane; the two clasped hands.

There was a mist in the prominent eyes of the older man. There was a faint smile on the large mouth of the younger, a smile pregnant with sadness.

“Goodbye, _mein lieber Herr Zorn_,” murmured the older man.

There was emotion in his voice, tenderness in his tone, sorrow on his face.

“Adieu,” muttered the young man; an involuntary sigh escaped his lips.

Their hands remained clasped.

“I hope success will meet you wherever you turn,” the older resumed affectionately. “I hope your enemies will have no occasion to rejoice——”

A smile again appeared on the young man’s pale face, a cynical smile that only touched the iris of his eyes and the corners of his mouth.

“Don’t worry, _lieber Hirsch_. _Sie werden noch von mir hören!_” (You will hear from me yet!)

A sympathetic pressure of their hands and they both smiled.

The young man jumped into the vehicle, the driver slightly rose in his seat and clacked his tongue, the horses moved.

“Goodbye,” the man called from the curb.

“Goodbye,” called back the young man from the moving cart and waved his hand . . .