The next morning I received a little parcel directed in Minna's handwriting, and with the asylum seal.
At the top lay six sheets of note-paper, closely written; but on the last one the writing stopped at the top of the second page.
"Deareast Friend,—The doctor has told me that you have been here, and brought me your regards; he also has promised to give you my love, when you come again. It is an intense consolation to me to know that you are so near.
"I will write to you, only a little now and again, for it always moves me deeply, and the doctor has impressed upon me, most of all, to avoid all agitating thoughts, which, with this one exception, I do. But write I must, because only in that way can I avoid a constant restlessness. For I have the feeling that I might die suddenly; the doctor laughs at me when I say so, but it seems to me that I can see that he himself thinks the same. Still perhaps it is only weakness. At the same time it will be a'comfort to me to know that you will get a message from me, if it should happen.
"I have so much resting on my heart that I must tell you. I have collected your letters and some little things that I should not like to fall into other hands; and each time I add to this letter, I will enclose it in the parcel that I have already addressed to you.
"Perhaps we shall one day laugh together at this idea. God grant it may be so!
"I cannot very well bear to write any more to-night. Good-night, my Friend."
"Do you know what made me carry through (by the way, with great difficulty) this trip to Rathen, before the asylum closed its doors behind me, and why I came to the Grotto? Not only that, which likewise brought you there, but also the idea, that something would happen to me there, something extraordinary. However, not what happened, which was in reality still more wonderful, no, I thought that the agitation of mind in coming there would be too overpowering for me—that it would either kill me or drive me mad, even this I would prefer to the state of mind in which I was.
"But how blessed it was to meet you there, Harald! I saw that you were the same, and you also felt that I was unaltered—towards you. Towards him I surely was changed.
"I know quite well how painful it was to you that my indignation towards him was so apparent, and still I could not help it. So nasty I have already become, so much bitterness—yes, hatred—has risen up in me.
"This you will very likely not understand.
"How is it possible to detest a human being one has loved? Or perhaps better ask (for very likely, to you, that is what seems incomprehensible): 'How can one love a being whom one comes to look down upon to such a degree, when by daily intercourse one gets to know his true character?' And here we are not speaking about a passing falling in love, for I did know something of him.
"This I have thought of more than anything else, and in order that you may understand me thoroughly, I must tell you what I think of it.
"A nature like Stephensen's, in which from the beginning, after all, there were some noble seeds (without them I suppose he would not have been an artist, not even the artist he is); when such a nature, still young and not quite debased, feels love for a young girl, then he grows higher and nobler, and she comes to know—and to love—a different being from what he was before. Still, this is not a deceit; on the contrary, she knows and loves just what he will be through their relations to one another, and in her something corresponding takes place, she develops, her character gets stronger and her views broader.
"All this is beautiful and true.
"But then the difference between the different natures appears in the course of time: such men in whom the nobler seeds are strong enough, really develop towards this ideal and gradually strengthen in it, but the others cannot keep themselves on the height to which they have been raised, they even sink below it."
"What I wrote last strained and affected me very much. It was so sad to think of and so difficult to make plain. Yesterday I could not write anything. I will not try to develop this idea any further, though it is of great importance to me that you quite understand, for it is in this point alone that my excuse lies. But surely you have understood. I dare not insist that it answers generally, but in this case it must be so.
"It was about my life in Denmark I wanted to tell you something.
"I wonder if you remember what Sieglinde says about her life with Hunding—
"'Foreign seemed all until now,
Friendless I was and forsaken;
I counted strange and unknown,
Each and all that came near.'
"Still it was not because of my being 'a foreigner' in a national sense, though I suppose that has also done something. Besides, you know well that there is a good deal in the German nature and also in our art—apart from the great classics—with which I have never sympathised.
"In the beginning I really found everything lovely: liberty, broadness of mind, education, and all that sort of thing.
"But soon I felt how hollow the kernel was. I had indeed had a quintessence of the whole in Stephensen to observe too closely. After all it was no wonder that I did not blend with this circle, as it consisted of my husband's friends, anyhow by name. Some few, of course, appealed more to me. But none of them resembled you. When I now and again met a person sympathetic to me, it was as a rule one who belonged to another set, and by some chance came in touch with ours, but soon retired. That our circle, however, was the most spiritual in Denmark and represented the highest intellect of the country, I heard almost every time we met. Indeed, it was also the most honourable; for the others were not only more or less idiots, but also sworn enemies of truth and righteousness. Ah, I could write much about these things, for I have a good memory, and I have heard many brilliant speeches!
"There was a time when I tried to settle down and give in to it; it was my duty, Stephensen said. I thought that perhaps they were right and I was wrong, possibly I was queer and absurd. I shrugged my shoulders with the others at things that at the bottom of my heart I found noble and elevating, I tried to admire what was repulsive to my inmost self, I pretended to believe that the quality of virtue was hypocrisy and the word itself an absurdity, no, an 'indecency,' as one of Stephensen's intellectual friends said. In short, I tried to howl with the wolves I was among (after all you have wolves in Denmark, haven't you?—do you remember when you made fun of me?—but no lions). I did not succeed in getting my stiff neck bent, perhaps the fault is mostly yours, and this is not the least I have to thank you for."
"We lived very sociably, as Stephensen had a real mania for diversion, and this sociability often lasted far into the night. As I had to get up early in the morning—after the German custom I was a rather industrious housewife, and had to be so to make two ends meet—this added considerably to the breaking down of my health.
"Sometimes I tried to excuse myself, which always made Stephensen most irritable. Very likely I should in the end have got my way, had it not been for one thing: my jealousy.
"How I have suffered from jealousy, I can hardly make you understand. I do not believe any man can understand it, though your sex is supposed to have produced Othellos.
"One would think that when a wife has lost so much respect and love for her husband, and when hardly any relationship exists, she would be able almost with indifference to see him run after others. With me it was almost the reverse. The cooler I felt towards him, the more burning was my jealousy. As a painter's wife I had besides a special enemy—the model. I have lowered myself to listening at the door when he had models. No wonder I could fight against sleep at insufferable parties in order to keep an eye on him.
"These efforts, unfortunately, were crowned with a terrible success. I had for a long time suspected the blonde lady you saw at Café à Porta. One day, shortly after that evening, I discovered that he had locked himself up with her in the studio, under pretence of having a model. I was so insistent that he confessed. Once having got into a sort of talkative repentance, he poured forth much more than I had suspected. I heard that his unfaithfulness went as far back as the first years, nay, even to the period when he most of all
"No, I cannot write about it.
"How I hate him!"
"When my child died I grieved dreadfully, but a year had not passed before I looked upon it as a blessing. I have told you so much about my father; you see I feared that I might have been a mother of the same kind. For I felt the same process of petrifying beginning in me, like the one the effect of which I had felt as a child, and which later I have understood.
"There was now no duty to prevent me from retiring into myself. My one and only life was to read our great poets and cultivate music—especially Beethoven and Wagner, whose piano scores I possessed. It was a world after my own heart, and so different from all that I was doomed to come in contact with.
"You know how passionately fond of music I am, but also how strongly it affects my nervous system to play much. I once said to you jokingly that if I wanted to kill my reason, it would be through piano-playing. Perhaps I really have tried mentally to take my life through this heavenly poison.
"Had I seen any light, had I known what I am now aware of, surely I should have spared myself more."
"I wish I knew really what you think of death. Do you believe in a reunion? It is difficult to realise, still, I cannot understand that my own self should quite vanish. I often think of old Hertz, whom I have heard talking about the soul and immortality on many different occasions. As it was, in the main, the doctrine of his beloved Kant (or so I understood), it is no great wonder if I, poor unlearned creature as I was and am, should not have mastered it at all. Nevertheless, it struck me deeply at that time, and in later days the mystic lore he was so fond of has recurred to me in many a lonely and desolate hour. One sentence, and I trust, the very one fitted to be the key to this whole train of thought, has stamped itself upon my memory almost word for word, because Hertz used to recapitulate it on every possible occasion, with many variations, to be sure, but it always came to this: 'What we call Self is not Self as it is in reality (only for this he had a queer phrase, 'in itself,' I think), but only as it appears in our sense-consciousness.' Now, over this sentence I have pondered many and many a time in my own stupid way, because I wanted very badly to know what my self in reality was, hoping that it might turn out to be something better than what I did know of myself. And often I have fancied that that which I do not know of myself, because it does not appear in the little dim mirror of consciousness, and that which you—for the same reason—do not know of yourself, are in reality, if not exactly the same thing, at least two things that are very closely allied to one another, so much so, indeed, that it shall one day seem to us only a bad and mad dream that we could ever have been separated.
"These are odd thoughts, one may say. But they have their comforting side for all that.
"And perhaps you will not find them so very odd, after all, nor of a wholly unfamiliar stamp. For you have told me that your father was an old disciple of Schopenhauer's, and that he used to speak to you of his beliefs and his views. Now, I certainly have read nothing of Schopenhauer myself, but I remember that Hertz often mentioned him as a great thinker of the school of Kant, though rather too mystical for his taste. So, perhaps, what I have said may even have a familiar ring about it.
"But I really am glad that I have a good safe lock to my writing-case, and can shut up these sheets. For I have a shrewd suspicion that if the Professor read these 'odd thoughts' he would have me removed at once to the other part of this great castle, where the incurables are lodged."
For a long time I sat musing with the sheet in my hand. Alas, but one remained, and only the first page was covered with writing. I had no need to hurry! It seemed to me that all that was worth reading was there, on the last sheet of note-paper.
So I mused over these "odd thoughts," which touched me deeply. Minna was quite right: they reminded me of my dear father, recalled to my mind many a ramble by his side through our great woods, rambles on which he liked to indulge in metaphysical speculations about the "will in nature," as manifesting itself in the lives of the trees and animals of the forest. How much had I lamented, in the days of my engagement to Minna, that I could not take her to him, who would have been as sure to be a father to her as she to be a daughter to him. Both were deep and original natures and had so much in common. How fond they both were of plants and animals, how responsive to every beauty of nature! Both, too, had a strain of melancholy and a golden touch of humour. And now they had, as it were, already met; they belonged to another world, and I was left alone—oh, so utterly alone!
But in the last lines Minna was so vividly present that I could hardly realise she was no more where I could reach her. That little humorous touch of hers that gushed forth fountain-like amid thoughts of deepest earnestness and sadness, that note of subtle irony at the expense of the worthy professor, whom she had long found out as the up-to-date man of science, with no mystical nonsense whatever about him, was so thoroughly in her own dear manner, that I almost fancied I could see the arch smile on those sweet lips which now … alas … alas!…
And now there remained but the last page of the tiny manuscript!
At last I took heart of grace to read it.
"But why am I speaking of death and of the beyond the grave to-day? It is strange, for I have not for a very long time been in so hopeful spirits as to-day.
"The weather is so lovely. All the forenoon I have been sitting with my sewing in the Professor's garden. He is an excellent man.
"To-morrow I shall tell you more about how time goes here. But to-night I am not writing any more. I will read Schiller. The other day, when I was turning over the last volume, I got such a desire to try if I could grasp Ueber das Erhabene. The Professor is afraid that this kind of reading may prove trying to me, and recommends historical works. I also began to read Schiller's Thirty Years' War, but it wearied me dreadfully. I cannot help it; it was already like that in my schooldays, everything historical bored me.
"Good-night, Harald!"
The reading of this journal had created so deep and solemn an impression upon me that I had been unable to find relief in tears; I had not yet wept since her death.
But as I finally clutched for the remaining contents of the parcel, and got a strangely crumpled and curled letter in my hand, that letter from me which she had carried on her breast, then I pressed it to my lips and sobbed like a child.
I have read again the first of these leaves. How could I write those foolish words—
"And have I ever regretted it? Even to this very day, it is now five years ago, I am unable to answer this question."
As if I, for any prize in the world, would give up our love, give up the remembrance of Minna! As if any happiness could be to me so precious as my grief!
I arbitrarily undertook to look after the funeral. To my joy—yes, it really was a joy to me!—I secured a grave on "Der weite Kirchhof," quite close to the resting-place of Hertz and his wife, under one of the giant poplars.
On the tomb I ordered a broken column of the most beautiful Saxonian Serpentine to be placed, without any other inscription than the name:
MINNA