Chapter V: Golovin page 301 (2)

The enterprising, resolute girl made her attack vigorously. At first the poet, aged twenty-four, shied at the thought of marriage, and especially of marriage with a very plain young person, with a loud voice and rather _Junker_ manners; the portals of a brilliant future stood wide open before him—what need had he of family peace, or a wife? But the banker’s daughter, on her side, offered in the _present_ a sack of gold, a tour in Italy, Paris, Strasbourg pies, and Clos de Vougeot: the poet was poor as a church mouse; he could not go on living at the Vollens’ for ever—he hesitated and hesitated—and ... accepted the offer, forgetting to say thank you to old Vollen, Vogt’s grandfather.

Emma herself used to tell me how minutely and carefully the poet conducted negotiations about the dowry. He even sent sketches of the furniture, the curtains, and so on, from Zurich, and would have it all despatched before the wedding—he insisted upon that.

There was no thought of love; there had to be something to take its place. Emma understood that and made up her mind to secure her power by other measures. They spent some time in Zurich, she took her husband to Italy and then settled with him in Paris. There she assigned her _Schatz_ a study with soft sofas, heavy velvet hangings, expensive rugs and bronze statuettes, and arranged for him a whole life of empty idleness. This was new to him and he liked it, but meanwhile his talent died down, and he produced nothing; she was vexed at this, scolded him for it and at the same time drew him more and more into bourgeois luxury. Here is an example of the extremes to which her solicitude would go. On one occasion in Italy, Herwegh was dissatisfied with the eau de Cologne. At once his wife wrote to Jean Marie Farina to send the very purest eau de Cologne to her husband in Rome. Meanwhile, he went away from Rome, leaving instructions that letters and parcels should be sent on to Naples; in the same way he left Naples shortly afterwards.... Some months later a box containing the eau de Cologne reached them in Paris, with an immense bill to pay for its travelling expenses.

She was in her own way not at all stupid and had far more strength and energy than he. Her culture was typically German—she had read an immense amount, but not what is necessary, and had studied all manner of subjects without reaching a clear grasp of anything. Her complete lack of feminine grace made an unpleasant impression. From her abrupt voice to her angular gestures and angular features, from her cold eyes to her eagerness to drag the conversation down to ambiguous topics, everything about her was masculine. Openly, before every one, she dangled about her husband as elderly men dangle about young girls; she looked into his eyes, glanced at him to draw our attention to him, straightened his necktie, smoothed his hair and praised him with revolting indiscretion. Before strangers he was embarrassed by this, but in his own circle paid no attention to it, as a man absorbed in his work does not notice the devotion with which his dog licks his boots and fawns upon him. They sometimes had scenes over this after visitors had gone away; but next day the adoring Emma would begin the same fond pestering again, and he would put up with it again for the sake of his comforts and for the sake of her zealous supervision of everything. The following anecdote will show better than anything the extremes to which she went in spoiling her darling. Ivan Turgenev went in to see them one evening after dinner. He found Herwegh lying on the sofa. Emma was rubbing his foot; she left off when their visitor entered. ‘Why have you stopped? Go on!’ said the poet wearily. ‘Are you ill?’ asked Turgenev. ‘No, not at all, but it’s very pleasant. Well, what’s the news?’ They went on talking while Emma went on rubbing his feet.

Fully persuaded that every one admired her husband, she chattered about him incessantly, without observing either that it was very boring to others, or that she did him no good by her anecdotes of his delicate nerves and capricious exactingness; to her all that seemed very charming and quite worth being imprinted for ever and ever in the memory of men; other people were revolted by it.

‘My Georg is a fearful egoist and quite spoilt (_zu verwöhnt_),’ she used to say; ‘but who has more right to be spoilt than he? All great poets have been capricious children all their lives, and they have always been spoilt. The other day he bought me a superb camellia; when he got it home he was so loth to part with it that he did not even show it me, but hid it in his cupboard and kept it there till it was quite withered—_so kindisch!_’

That is word for word what she told us. By this idolatrous worship Emma brought her Georg to the edge of an abyss; he fell into it, indeed, and if he did not perish, covered himself with shame and disgrace.

The news of the February revolution roused Germany. Hearts were set throbbing, talk and murmuring were heard from one end to another of the one United German Fatherland divided into thirty parts. The German workmen in Paris formed themselves into a club, and considered what they were to do. The Provisional Government encouraged them, not to rise, but to leave France; their sleep was somewhat troubled as it was by the French workmen. Of course, it might well happen that after Flocon’s[11] parting blessing, and Caussidière’s[12] strong language about tyrants and despots, these poor fellows would be shot or hanged, or thrown for twenty years into prison; but they did not care about that.

A campaign in Baden was resolved upon; but who was to be their deliverer? Who was to lead this new _armée du Rhin_, consisting of a few hundred peaceful workmen and craftsmen? Who, thought Emma, if not the great poet, with his lyre on his back and his sword in his hand, on the ‘battle steed’ of which he dreamed in his poems? He would sing after battle and conquer after singing; he would be chosen dictator, he would be in the assembly of kings and dictate to them the will of his Germany; in Berlin, _Unter den Linden_, his statue would be set up, and would be visible from the old banker’s house, his name would be sung through the ages, and ... in those songs the good, devoted Emma, who had accompanied him as sword-bearer, page, orderly, and watched over him _in der Schwertfahrt_, would perhaps not be forgotten. And she ordered herself, in the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs, a martial riding-habit of the three national colours—black, red, and gold, and bought herself a black velvet béret with a cockade of the same three colours.

Through friends, Emma suggested the poet to the workmen; having no one in view and remembering Herwegh’s poems calling them to rebellion, they chose him their leader. Emma persuaded him to accept the position.

What led this woman to thrust the man she so loved into this dangerous position? Where, how, when had he shown that presence of mind, that faculty of being stimulated by a crisis which gives a man control over it, that rapidity of reflection, that clearness of vision, and that spirit of defiance, in fact, without which no surgeon can perform an operation, no guerilla chief lead his followers? Where was this weakling to find strength to rouse one side of his nerves to redoubled activity and to suppress the other into insensibility? She herself had both determination and self-control, and that makes it the more unpardonable in her to have forgotten how he started at the slightest sound, turned pale at the least misadventure, how depressed he was at the slightest physical pain and how he lost his head at the sight of danger.

What made her lead him into the terrible ordeal, where pretence is useless, where there is no saving yourself by prose or verse, where the choice lies between the laurel wreath upon the tomb on one hand, and flight and the pillory of disgrace on the other? Her expectations were utterly different—she unconsciously described them in conversations and letters afterwards.

The republic in Paris had been proclaimed almost without fighting, the revolution was getting the upper hand in Italy, the news from Berlin and even from Vienna showed clearly that those thrones were tottering; it was difficult to imagine that the Duke of Baden or the King of Würtemberg could stand firm against the onrush of revolutionary ideas. It might have been expected that at the first shout of freedom the soldiers would fling away their weapons, and the people would open their arms to the insurgents, the poet would proclaim the republic, the republic would proclaim the poet dictator—had not Lamartine been dictator! All that would be left then would be for the dictator-poet to pass in triumphal procession through the whole of Germany, with his black, red, and gold Emma in her béret, to be covered with military and civic glory....

In reality things turned out otherwise. The dull-witted soldier of Baden or Swabia knows nothing of poets or republics, but he knows his discipline and his corporal very well indeed and, from his innate servility, loves them, and blindly obeys his officers. The peasants were taken unawares, the revolutionaries moved without a serious plan and with nothing prepared. Even brave men like Hecker[13] and Willich[14] could do nothing—they too were defeated, but they did not flee from the field of battle and, luckily for them, had no adoring German woman beside them.

When firing began, Emma saw her pale and terrified Georg with tears of terror in his eyes, ready to fling away his sword and hide anywhere—and she completed his ruin. She stood in front of him under fire and called on his comrades to save the poet. The soldiers were victorious. Emma, covering her husband’s flight, ran the risk of being wounded, killed, or taken prisoner, that is, sent for twenty years to Spandau or Rastadt, besides a preliminary flogging.

He hid in a neighbouring village at the very beginning of the battle. There he rushed to a peasant, beseeching and imploring the latter to hide him. The peasant hesitated at first, fearing the soldiers, but at last called him into his yard and, looking round, hid the future dictator in an empty barrel and covered him with straw, exposing his house to the risk of pillage and himself to the risk of _Fuchtel_ and imprisonment. The soldiers appeared—the peasant did not betray him, but sent word to Emma, who came to fetch him, hid her husband in a cart, changed her clothes, seated herself on the box and drove him over the frontier. ‘What was the name of the man who saved you?’ we asked him. ‘I forgot to ask him,’ Herwegh answered calmly.

His irritated comrades fell upon the luckless poet with fury, paying him out at the same time for having grown rich and for his lodgings being covered with ‘gilt carving’ and for his aristocratic effeminacy, and so on. His wife so utterly failed to see the _portée_ of what she had done that four months later she published, in her husband’s defence, a brochure, in which she described her own heroic deeds, oblivious of the light this threw on him.

Soon charges were made against him, not only of running away, but of wasting and concealing the party funds. I think that the money was not appropriated by him, but at the same time I feel sure that it was aimlessly squandered and on utterly unnecessary fancies of the martial pair. P. Annenkov was an eye-witness of the purchase of pasties and turkeys stuffed with truffles, at Chevet’s, and wines and so on being packed in the leader’s travelling carriage. Money was given by Flocon in accordance with the instructions of the Provisional Government: there are very strange variations in the estimate of this sum; the French talked of thirty thousand francs, Herwegh declared that he had not received even half that, but that the government had paid his railway fare. To this charge the returning insurgents added, that when they reached Strasbourg, hungry, ragged, and without a farthing, after the defeat, they applied to Herwegh for assistance, and were refused—Emma did not even allow them to see him—while he was living in an expensive hotel and wearing ‘yellow morocco slippers.’ Why they regarded that as a sign of luxury, I do not know, but I heard of those yellow slippers a dozen times.

All this happened as in a dream. At the beginning of March the deliverers of their country, _in spe_, had been still feasting in Paris; by the middle of May, defeated, they crossed the French frontier back again. Herwegh, coming to his senses in Paris, saw his old garden path to glory choked up—real life had sternly reminded him of his limits. He realised that his position—the poet of his wife, and the dictator who had fled the field of battle—was awkward.... He had to begin his life afresh, or go to the bottom. I fancied—and that was where I made my worst mistake—that he would outgrow the petty side of his character. I fancied that I could help him in this more than any one.

And how could I help thinking it when the man said to me every day (and later on wrote it): ‘I know the pitiful weakness of my character—your character is clearer and stronger than mine—support me, be an elder brother, a father to me.... I have no one near or dear to me—I concentrate on you all my affections—you can make anything of me by love and friendship—do not be severe, but kind and indulgent. Let me keep your hand ... and, indeed, I shall not let it go, I cling to you.... In one thing I am not inferior to you, perhaps, indeed, go beyond you—in my unbounded love for any one dear to my heart.’

He was not lying, but all this laid no obligation upon him. He was not lying, but the truth cost him nothing. Why, he did not go to the Baden rising either, meaning to desert his comrades in the hour of conflict, but at the sight of danger he fled. So long as there is no hindrance, no conflict, so long as neither effort nor sacrifice is needed, all may go swimmingly—for whole years, for a whole lifetime ... but if there is any stumbling-block in the path, then there will be trouble, crime, or shame. Why did I not understand that then!

* * * * *

Towards the end of 1848, Herwegh took to spending almost every evening with us. It was dull for him at home. Emma did, indeed, bother him dreadfully. She had come back from the Baden expedition exactly the same as she went. She had no inner misgivings over what had happened. As before, she was in love, satisfied, talkative, as though they had come back from a victory, or at any rate with no wounds in the back. Only one thing worried her—shortage of money and the certain expectation of soon having none at all. The revolution at which he had so unsuccessfully assisted had not freed Germany, nor covered the poet’s brow with laurels, but it had completely ruined the old banker, her father. She was for ever trying to dissipate her husband’s gloomy thoughts; it never entered her head that only these mournful reflections might perhaps be his salvation.

The superficial, volatile Emma had no yearnings for deep spiritual thought, productive apparently of nothing but pain. Hers was one of those natures (like simple tunes in two time) which cut every Gordian knot with their _entweder oder_; to left or to right does not matter to them so long as they can extricate themselves somehow and hurry on again ... whither? That they do not know themselves. She would break into the middle of a talk either with an anecdote or with a practical observation—though its practical bearings were of the lowest order. Convinced that no one among us was gifted with so much practical ability as she, instead of concealing her business abilities through coquetry, she coquettishly displayed them. It must be said, moreover, that she never showed any real practical good sense. Fussing about, discussing prices and cooks, furniture and materials, is something very different from business capacity. Everything in her house was at sixes and sevens, because everything was subordinated to her monomania; she was for ever on the _qui vive_, watching her husband’s face, and she put his caprices before all the real necessities of life, and even before the health and education of the children.

Herwegh naturally struggled to get away from home, and sought with us peace and harmony; he saw in us a sort of ideal family in which he loved everything, worshipped everything, the children as much as us. He dreamed of going with us somewhere far away and thence calmly watching the fifth act of the dark European tragedy. And for all that, except for having the same or very similar understanding of things in general, there was very little resemblance between us. Herwegh somehow brought everything in the world back to himself, he devoted himself for his own ends, sought attention with timidity and vanity, was diffident and at the same time persuaded of his superiority. All this taken together made him coquettish and capricious, sometimes he was intentionally melancholy, attentive or inattentive. He was in perpetual need of some one who would be guide, friend, confidant and slave all at once, precisely as Emma was, who would put up with coldness and upbraiding when his services were not needed, and who would be ready at the first beck to rush back again and do what he was ordered with smiling obedience.

I, too, sought love and friendship, sought sympathy and even applause, and tried to win them, but I have never had a trace of this feminine feline playing at _dépit_ and scenes of explanation, this everlasting thirst for attention and petting. Possibly the unrestrained truthfulness, excessive self-confidence, and healthy simplicity of my behaviour—my _laisser aller_—also arises from vanity, perhaps through them I call down misfortune on my head, but so it is. In laughter and in sorrow, in love and in public interests, I yielded myself sincerely, and could rejoice and grieve with no thought of myself. With strong nerves and muscles, I stood independent and self-reliant, and was ready to give a helping hand to another, though I never asked for help or support as a charity for myself. With such opposite temperaments it could hardly be expected that there should not be sometimes unpleasant encounters between Herwegh and me. But, in the first place, he was much more on his guard with me than with others; in the second, he completely disarmed me by the mournful recognition that he was in fault; he did not justify himself, but in the name of friendship begged indulgence for the weakness which he himself recognised and censured. I played the part of a sort of guardian, defended him from others and gave him lectures which he received submissively. His submissiveness was extremely distasteful to Emma—she was jealously resentful of it.

The year 1849 had come.

II

THE YEAR 1849

DELIRIUM OF THE HEART

Little by little, in 1849, I began to notice various changes in Herwegh. His moody character became more and more moody; he had attacks of insufferable melancholy and weakness. His wife’s father lost his fortune for good and all; the remnants that were saved were needed for other members of the family ... poverty knocked more rudely at the poet’s door.... He could not think of it without shuddering and losing every trace of manliness. Emma struggled her utmost, borrowed right and left, obtained goods on credit and sold her things—and all that he might not notice the true position of affairs. She not only denied herself necessaries, but even had no underclothes made for the children that he might dine at the Provençal Frères and buy himself rubbish. He took money from her, not knowing how she had obtained it, and not wishing to know. I reproached her for this, told her that she was ruining him, and hinted the same to him—he persistently refused to understand, while she lost her temper, and everything went on as before.

Though he was ludicrously afraid of poverty, yet that was not the cause of his depression. In his lamentations about himself one note was continually recurring, and I grew sick of hearing it; in the end, it annoyed me to hear Herwegh’s everlasting repetition of complaints of his own weakness, accompanied with reproaches for my not needing kindness and caresses, while he was fading and perishing without a helping hand, while he was so lonely and unhappy that he longed to die, while, though he had a deep respect for Emma, his sensitive, differently attuned soul shrank from her harsh, rough contact and even from her ‘loud voice.’ Then followed passionate protestations of his affection for me.... Through this feverish and nervous condition I began to discern a feeling that alarmed me for him as much as for myself. It seemed to me that his affection for Natalie was assuming a more passionate character. There was nothing for me to do, I remained silent, and began sorrowfully to foresee that in this way we were rapidly making for great trouble, and that something in our life would be shattered.

... Everything was shattered.

The everlasting talk of despair, the everlasting entreaty for attention, for a warm word, and dependence upon it, and the complaining and complaining—all this had an immense effect on a woman whose hardly-won serenity had just been destroyed, and who was suffering from the profoundly tragic surroundings in which we were living.

‘There is an element left out in you,’ Natalie said to me, ‘and the lack of it goes very well with your character; you don’t understand the yearning for the tender care of a mother, a friend, a sister, which so frets Herwegh. I understand it because I feel it myself. He is a big child, while you are a grown-up man; he can be distressed or made happy by a trifle. A harsh word is almost death to him, he must be spared.... On the other hand, with what infinite gratitude he thanks one for the smallest attention, for warmth, for sympathy!...’

Could it be?... But no, he would himself have told me before speaking to her ... and I kept his secret inviolate and did not hint at it with one word. I regretted that he did not speak to me. A secret may be kept if it is entrusted to no one, but only if it is to no one. If he had spoken of his love he _could not_ have been silent with a man with whom he was living in such spiritual intimacy, and about a secret so closely affecting the latter. So he had not spoken.... I forgot for the time the old novel entitled _Arminius_.

Towards the end of 1849 I went from Zurich to Paris to take steps about my mother’s money, which was detained by the Russian Government. I parted from Herwegh when I left Geneva. On the way I met him in Berne. I found him reading to Simon[15] of Trèves fragments from _Vom andern Ufer_, from the proofs. He rushed at me as though we had not met for months. I was going on the evening of the same day. He did not leave my side for a minute, again and again repeating declarations of the most ardent and passionate affection. Why did he not find the strength then to make a straightforward and open confession?... I was kindly disposed to him then, everything might have happened humanely.

He saw me off to the posting-station, said good-bye and, leaning against the gate by which the posting-chaise drove out, remained there wiping his eyes.... This was almost the last moment when I really loved the man.... It was only after thinking the whole night that I came to one word which I could not get out of my head—‘disaster, disaster!’ ‘What will come of it?’

My mother soon afterwards left Paris. I remained at Emma’s, but was in reality completely alone. This solitude was essential for me; I wanted to be alone, to think what to do. A letter from Natalie, in which she spoke of her sympathy for Herwegh, gave me an opening and I made up my mind to write to her. My letter was sorrowful but calm; I begged her to look quietly and attentively into her own heart and to be open with herself and with me, I reminded her that we were too closely bound together by all the past and by all our life to leave anything unspoken. ‘I got your letter of the 9th’ (Natalie wrote, and this letter has remained, almost all the rest were burnt), ‘and I, too, sit and only wonder: why is this? And I weep and weep. Perhaps it is all my fault, perhaps I don’t deserve to live—but I feel just as I wrote to you on the evening when I was left alone. Blameless towards you and towards the whole world, I have had no feeling of reproach in my soul. I have grown into my love for you as I have into God’s world; if I were not in it, it seems I should be nowhere! To be cast out of that world—anywhere, I must be born again. I am inseparable from it as from nature, come from it and go back into it again. I have never for one instant felt differently. It is a wide, rich world, I know no inner world so rich; perhaps it is too large, perhaps it has too much enlarged my being and its needs—in this fullness there are minutes, and there have been from the very beginning of our life together, in which somewhere deep down in the bottom of my soul, something like a fine hair has fretted my soul imperceptibly, and then everything has been bright again....’ ‘This unsatisfied something, this something left unused and outcast,’ Natalie writes in another letter, craved other sympathy, and found it in Herwegh’s affection.

This was not enough for me, and I wrote to her: ‘Don’t turn away from simply looking into the depths of yourself, don’t try to find explanations. You won’t escape the whirlpool by talking, it will carry you away just the same. There is a new note in your letters unfamiliar to me, not the note of sadness, but another.... Now everything is still in our hands ... let us have the courage to go to the bottom of it. Consider that since we have put the secret which troubled our soul into words, _Herwegh will be a false note in our harmony or I shall. I am ready to go with Sasha to America_, then we shall see how things are ... it will be hard for me, but I shall try to bear it; here it will be harder still, and I cannot bear it!’

To this letter she answered with a cry of horror, the thought of separation from me had never occurred to her. ‘How can you! How can you—and to part from you ... as though that were possible ... no, no, I long to come to you, to come to you at once.... I am going to pack up, and in a few days I shall be in Paris with the children!’

On the day of leaving Zurich she wrote again: ‘As though after storm and shipwreck I come back to you as to my haven, with full faith, with full love. If only the state of your soul were like that in which I am now! I am happier than ever! I love you always the same, but I have learnt to know your love better, and all my accounts with life are settled—I expect nothing, I desire nothing. Misunderstandings!—I am grateful to them, they have made so much clear to me, and they will pass away and disappear like storm-clouds.’

Our meeting in Paris was not joyful, but it was filled with the feeling of deep, genuine recognition that the roots of our life had gone too deep for the storm to tear them up, that it was not easy to part us. In the long conversations of that period, one thing surprised me, and I looked out for it several times, and was every time convinced that I was right. Together with the warm affection she still retained for Herwegh, Natalie seemed to breathe more freely away from him, as though stepping out of the circle of some black magic spell; she was afraid of him, she felt that there were dark forces in his soul, she was frightened by his boundless egoism and she looked for support and protection in me.

Though he knew nothing of my correspondence with Natalie, Herwegh saw that there was something wrong from my letters. As a matter of fact, apart from everything else, I was very much displeased with him. Emma was struggling, weeping, trying to satisfy him and get him money, while he either left her letters unanswered or wrote spiteful things and kept asking for more and more money.

His letters to me which I have kept are more like ecstatic love-letters than a friendly correspondence. He tearfully reproaches me for coldness, he beseeches me not to abandon him, he cannot live without me, without the full cloudless sympathy of the past, he curses our misunderstandings and the interference of the ‘frantic woman’ (_i.e._, Emma), he thirsts to begin a new life, a life far away, a life with us, and again he calls me his father, his brother, his dearest friend. To all this I wrote to him in different variations: ‘Consider whether you are capable of beginning a new life, whether you are able to shake off ... the rottenness, the corrupt civilisation’—and twice I reminded him of Aleko,[16] to whom the old Gypsy says: ‘Leave us, proud man, you want freedom for yourself alone.’ He answered this with tears and reproaches, but did not speak out. His letters of 1850 and our first conversations at Nice make up a terrible indictment ... of what? Of deceit, of treachery, of lying?... No. And that would be nothing new—but of that weak-spirited doubleness of which I have so many times accused the Western European. Going many times over all the details of our mournful drama, I am always brought up short with amazement at how this man never once, never by one word, never by one straightforward impulse of the heart, betrayed himself. How could he, feeling the impossibility of being open with me, try to enter into closer and closer intimacy with me, and touch in his talk on those sacred places of the soul which can only be touched without sacrilege in perfect and mutual openness?

The moment when he guessed my doubt—and not only kept silent, but assured me more and more warmly of his affection, and at the same time worked more and more intensely by his despair on the woman whose heart was shaken—the moment when he began passively deceiving me by his silence while beseeching her (as I afterwards learned) not to deprive him of my affection by an incautious word—that moment was the beginning of crime.

Crime!... Yes ... and all the calamities that follow come as the simple, inevitable consequence of it—they come unchecked by deaths, unchecked by penitence, because they are not the punishment but the consequence.... Consequences come upon a generation through the terrible immutability of what has once been done. Atonement, repentance may reconcile a man to himself and to others, penitence may redeem him, but the consequences of his action go their own terrible way. To escape from them, religion has invented paradise—and its antechamber the monastery.

I was turned out of Paris, and almost at the same time Emma was also. We decided to spend a year or two in Nice—it was then Italy—and Emma went there also. Within a short time, that is, towards winter, my mother was to come to Nice, and with her Herwegh.

Why did I go with Natalie to that town? This question has occurred to me and to others, but it is really a petty one. Apart from the fact that wherever I had gone Herwegh could have come too, was it possible to achieve anything but mortification by geographical and other external measures?

Within a fortnight or three weeks of his arrival, Herwegh assumed the airs of a Werther—in the last stages of despair—and so conspicuously that a Russian doctor, who was passing through Nice, was convinced that he was becoming definitely insane. His wife used to appear with tear-stained eyes—he treated her outrageously. She would come for hours together to weep in Natalie’s room, and both were convinced that to-day or to-morrow he would fling himself into the sea or shoot himself. Natalie’s pale cheeks and anxious expression, and her anxious preoccupation, even when she was with the children, showed me clearly what was passing within her.

Not a word had been said yet, but already through the external calm there was the gleam of something sinister coming nearer and nearer—like two glittering points continually disappearing and appearing again at the edge of the forest that show that a wild beast is there. Everything was moving rapidly to a climax. It was delayed by the birth of Olga.

III

THE YEAR 1851

1

Before the New Year Natalie brought a water-colour she had ordered from the painter Guyot,[17] to show me.

It was a sketch of our verandah, with part of the house and the yard, with the children playing in the yard and Tata’s goat lying there—Natalie herself was in the background, on the verandah. I thought that the sketch was meant for me, but Natalie said that she meant to give it to Herwegh for a New Year’s present.... I was vexed. ‘Do you like it?’ asked Natalie. ‘I like it so much,’ I said, ‘that if Herwegh will allow it, I will order a copy to be made for myself.’

From my pallor and my voice, Natalie saw that these words were both a challenge and the sign of a violent storm within. She glanced at me, there were tears in her eyes. ‘Take it for yourself,’ she said.

‘Nothing would induce me, anything so mean....’

We said no more. We kept the New Year at my mother’s, I was in a state of acute irritability; I sat beside Vogt and, filling his glass and mine over and over again, I kept making biting and sarcastic jokes. Vogt was rolling with laughter. Herwegh looked mournfully from under his brows. At last he understood. After drinking to the New Year, he raised his glass and said that the only thing he hoped was, ‘that the coming year might be no worse than the last, that he desired this with all his heart, but did not expect it. On the contrary, he had a foreboding that all, all would fall into ruins.’

I said nothing.

Next morning I took up my old novel, _Who is to Blame?_ and read over Lubinka’s diary and the last chapters. Could this be a prophecy of my fate, just as Onyegin’s duel foreshadowed Pushkin’s fate?... But an inner voice said to me: ‘You are a queer sort of Krutsifersky—and, indeed, he is a queer sort of Beltov! Where is his noble sincerity, where is my tearful self-sacrifice?’ And in the midst of my conviction of Natalie’s passing infatuation, I was even more convinced that I should fight it out with him, that he would not drive me out of her heart.

What happened was what I expected—Natalie herself invited explanation. After the scene over the sketch, and the New Year’s party at my mother’s, it was impossible to put it off. The conversation was painful. _We were both no longer on the high level on which we had been the year before._ She was confused, afraid of my going away, afraid of his going away, longed to go away herself for a year to Russia and was afraid to go. I saw her wavering and saw that he with his egoism would destroy her ... while she would not have the strength to withstand. I was beginning to hate him for his silence.

Once more I repeated ‘I put my fate in your hands. Once more I beseech you to weigh everything, to think of the value of everything.... I am still ready to accept any decision—I am ready to wait a day, a week, only the decision must be final. I feel,’ I said, ‘that I have reached the limit of my strength—I can still behave decently—but I feel, too, that I shan’t be able to for long.’

‘You are not going away, you are not going away,’ she said, bursting into tears, ‘I could not survive that.’ On her tongue such words were not to be taken lightly. ‘_He must go._’

‘Natalie, don’t be in a hurry—don’t be in a hurry to take the final decision because it is final ... wait a little ... think—as much as you like, but give me a definite answer. These ebbs and flows are more than I can stand ... they are making me stupid. I am growing petty, I shall go off my head.... Ask anything you like of me, but it must be once for all....’

At that point my mother and Kolya drove up to invite us to Mentone; when we went out to take our seats in the carriage, it appeared that there was one place too few. I motioned Herwegh to the seat. Herwegh, by no means distinguished by such delicacy as a rule, would not take it. I looked at him, slammed the carriage door and said to the coachman, ‘Off!’ We were left alone, the two of us, on the seashore in front of the house. I felt as though there were a stone on my heart; he was silent, pale as a sheet, and avoided my eyes. Why did not I begin speaking openly or shove him off the rock into the sea? A sort of nervous impotence prevented me. He said something to me about the sufferings of a poet and life being so horribly organised that a poet brings trouble everywhere. He suffers himself and makes every one near him suffer.... I asked him whether he had read George Sand’s _Horace_. He did not remember. I advised him to read it. He went to Visconti’s for the book.

_I never saw him again._

When, between six and seven, we all assembled for dinner, he was not there. His wife came in—her eyes swollen with tears: she announced that her husband was ill—we all looked at each other—I felt quite capable of sticking into her the knife I had in my hand. He shut himself up in his rooms on the top storey. By this _étalage_ he did for himself—I was free as regards him.

At last all the others had gone, and the children were in bed—_we were left alone_. Natalie sat in the window crying. I walked about the room, the blood throbbing in my temples; I could scarcely breathe.

‘He is going,’ she said at last.

‘I imagine that is not necessary—it is I must go.’

‘For God’s sake....’

‘I am going.’

‘Alexandr, Alexandr, don’t say what you may regret—listen to me—save us all. You alone can do it. He is crushed, he is utterly despondent. You know yourself what you have been to him, his frantic love—his frantic affection and the consciousness that he has caused you grief—and worse ... he wants to go away, to vanish, but you must not complicate things—or he is not a step from suicide.’

‘Do you believe that?’

‘I am certain of it.’

‘And it is he who says so?’

‘He and Emma. He has cleaned his pistol.’

I burst into a roar of laughter and asked: ‘Is it his Baden one—he’d have to clean it, it must have fallen in the mud. You can tell Emma, though, that I will answer for his life. I’ll insure it for any sum you like.’

‘Mind that you do not regret your laughter,’ said Natalie, shaking her head gloomily.

‘If you like I’ll go and persuade him....’

‘What will it all lead to?’

‘The consequences,’ I said, ‘are hard to foresee and still harder to avert.’

‘My God! My God!—the children, the poor children, what will become of them!’

‘You ought to have thought of them before!’ I said.

And that, of course, was the most cruel thing of all that I said to her. I was too much worked up to understand the meaning of what I said in a humane way. I felt something convulsive in my chest and in my head, and was, perhaps, capable of bloody acts as well as cruel words. She was utterly crushed—a silence followed. Half an hour passed, I wanted to drink my cup of bitterness to the dregs, and put several questions to her—she answered. I felt myself torn to shreds, savage impulses of revenge, of jealousy, of wounded _amour-propre_, made me drunk; no punishment, no gibbet could have had terrors for me, my life was not worth a farthing. That is what makes mad and dreadful deeds possible. I did not say a word—I stood in front of the big table in the drawing-room, with my arms folded—probably my face was utterly distorted.

The silence went on. All at once I glanced at her and was frightened—her face was covered with a deathly pallor, a bluish pallor, her lips were white, her mouth half-opened and twitching—not uttering a word, she gazed at me with vacant, frantic eyes. That look of infinite suffering, of mute agony instantly stilled the turmoil of passion; I felt sorry for her, tears trickled down my cheeks, I was ready to fall at her feet, to entreat her forgiveness.... I sat down on the sofa beside her, took her hand, put my head on her shoulder and tried to comfort her in a soft, gentle voice.

My conscience tormented me, I felt I had been an Inquisitor, a torturer.... Was this what was wanted? Was this a friend’s help, was this sympathy? And so with all my culture, with all my humanity, in a fit of fury and jealousy I could torture an unhappy woman, could play the part of a Bluebeard?

A few minutes passed before she said anything, before she could say anything—then suddenly she threw herself on my neck sobbing. I let her sink on the sofa; utterly worn out, she could only say: ‘Don’t be afraid, dear, these are good tears, tears of tenderness; no, no, I will never be parted from you.’

Her agitation and spasmodic sobbing was too much, she closed her eyes, she was fainting; I poured eau de Cologne on her head, moistened her temples; she grew calm, opened her eyes, pressed my hand, and sank into semi-consciousness which lasted more than an hour: I remained on my knees beside her; when she opened her eyes, she met my calm, mournful look, the tears were still rolling down my cheeks—she smiled to me....

This was the crisis. From that minute the stifling fumes that weighed on her began to lift, the poison acted less freely.

‘Alexandr,’ she said, recovering herself a little, ‘finish what you have done, swear to me—I must have it, I can’t live without it—swear that it shall all end without bloodshed—think of the children ... of what will become of them without you and without me.’

‘I promise to do everything possible to prevent a collision, to sacrifice a great deal—but for that I must have one thing, that he should leave to-morrow—go at least to Genoa.’

‘That’s as you like ... and we will begin a new life and let all that is past be past.’

I embraced her warmly.

Next morning Emma came to my room—she was dishevelled, with tear-stained eyes, looking very ugly, in a blouse with a cord round her waist. She approached me with tragic deliberation—at any other time I should have burst out laughing at this German melodrama ... now I was in no mood for laughing. I received her standing and made no attempt to conceal that her visit was unpleasant to me.

‘What do you want?’ I asked.

‘I have come from _him_ to you.’

‘Your husband,’ I said, ‘might come himself if he wants anything—or perhaps he has already shot himself?’

She folded her arms across her bosom.

‘And this is you speaking—you, his friend ... I don’t know you! Surely you must understand the tragedy of what is taking place before your eyes ... his tender constitution will not survive separation from her, nor a rupture with you—yes, yes, with you ... he is weeping over the sorrow he has caused you—he begged me to tell you that his life is in your hands, he begs you to kill him....’

‘This is a farce,’ I said, interrupting her speech. ‘Come, who invites people to murder like this, and through his wife too? This persisting in vulgar melodramatic tricks is disgusting to me. I am not a German.’

‘Herr Herzen!’

‘Madame Herwegh, why do you undertake such difficult commissions? You could hardly expect to hear anything pleasant from me.’

‘This is a fatal calamity,’ she said, after a pause; ‘it has struck you and me alike ... but look at the difference between your anger and my devotion....’

‘Madam,’ I said, ‘our parts have not been alike; I beg you not to compare them, for fear you should have to blush.’

‘Never,’ she said defiantly, ‘you do not know what you are saying.’ And then she added: ‘I will take him away, he must not remain in this position—your will shall be done. But you are no longer in my eyes the man I have so much respected and looked upon as Georg’s best friend. No, if you were that man, you would have parted with Natalie, let her go, let him go; I would have remained with you and the children here.’

I laughed aloud. She flushed crimson, and with a voice shaking with anger and indignation, asked me: ‘What does that mean?’

‘Why do you jest about serious matters?’ I said to her; ‘but that’s enough. Here is my ultimatum: go at once to Natalie, yourself alone, talk to her—if she wants to go, let her go—I shall not hinder any one or anything except (excuse me), except your staying here; I can manage the housekeeping myself somehow—but listen.... If she does not want to go, this is the last night I will spend under the same roof as your husband, we shall not both be here another night alive!’

An hour later Emma came back and gloomily announced to me, in a tone as though to say: ‘See the fruits of your wickedness!’

‘Natalie is not going—she has destroyed a great being from _amour-propre_—I will save him——’

‘And so?’

‘And so we are going in a day or two....’

‘A day or two? What do you mean? To-morrow morning! Have you forgotten the alternative?’ (Repeating this, I did not really break my promise to Natalie, I was absolutely certain she would take him away.)

‘I don’t know you—how bitterly I’ve been mistaken in you!’ observed the crazy woman, and she went out again.

Her diplomatic task this time was an easy one—she came back ten minutes later saying that he agreed to everything, both to going away and to a duel, but at the same time he had told her to tell me that he had taken a vow not to lift his pistol to my breast—but was ready to accept death at my hands.

‘You see how he keeps on joking with you—why, even the French king was put to death simply by a public executioner, and not by a friend. And so you will set off to-morrow?’

‘I really don’t know how to manage. We have nothing ready.’

‘Everything can be got ready before night.’

‘We must get a _visa_ for our passports.’

I rang the bell; Rocca, our cook, came in. I told him that Madame Emma begged him to take their passports at once and to get a _visa_ for Genoa.

‘But we have nothing for the journey.’

‘Do you need much to get to Genoa?’

‘Six hundred francs.’

‘Allow me to hand it you.’

‘We owe bills to the shops here.’

‘Approximately?’

‘Five hundred francs.’

‘Don’t worry yourself, and _bon voyage_.’

This tone she could not endure, _amour-propre_ was almost her leading passion.

‘Why,’ she said, ‘why this behaviour to _me_? Me you have no right to hate or to despise.’

‘So him I have?’

‘No,’ she said, choking with tears, ‘no, I only meant to say that I liked you sincerely as a sister, that I don’t like to leave you without shaking hands with you. I respect you, you may be right, but you are a cruel man. If you knew what I have been through!’

‘But why have you been all your life a slave?’ I said to her, giving her my hand; at that minute I was not capable of sympathy. ‘You deserve your fate.’

She went away hiding her face.

At ten o’clock next morning, in a hired coach, upon which various boxes and hampers were loaded, the poet set off—_mit Weib und Kind_—for Genoa. I was standing at the open window; he managed to whisk into the carriage so rapidly that I did not catch sight of him. She held out her hand to the cook and the maid, and took her seat beside him. Anything more ignominious than this bourgeois departure I cannot imagine. Natalie was distressed. We went out alone together into the country; the walk was a dismal one, the blood was still streaming from fresh, raw wounds. On returning home, the first person that met me was Herwegh’s son Horace, a boy of nine, a mischievous and thievish little fellow.

‘Where have you come from?’

‘From Mentone.’

‘What has happened?’

‘Here is a note from Maman for you.’

‘Lieber Herzen,’ she wrote, as if nothing had happened between us, ‘we are stopping for a couple of days at Mentone, the room at the hotel is small—Horace is in Georg’s way—allow us to leave him with you for a few days.’

This lack of tact amazed me. At the same time Emma wrote to Karl Vogt to come that they might consult him—so outsiders were to be mixed up in our affairs! I asked Vogt to take Horace and to say that we had no room.

‘Yet,’ she sent word to me through Vogt, ‘we still have the upper rooms for another three months, and I can make use of them.’ That was perfectly true—only it was I who paid the rent for those rooms. Yes, in this tragedy, as in Shakespeare, the coarse laughter, oaths, and petty cheating of the market-place are side by side with strains that tear the heart, with the moan of ebbing life, of dying faith, of dimming thought.

Emma had a maid-servant, a handsome and very honourable French girl from Provence, called Jeannette; she remained behind for a couple of days, and was to go with their luggage by steamer to Genoa. Next morning Jeannette softly opened my study door and asked me whether she might come in and speak to me alone. This had never happened before; I thought that she was wanting to ask for money, and was prepared to give it her. Blushing up to her ears, the good Provençale gave me, with tears in her eyes, various unpaid bills of Emma’s, and added: ‘Madame told me, but I really cannot do it without asking your leave—you see, she told me to buy a lot of different things in the shops and have them put down on these bills—I couldn’t do it without telling you.’

‘You did quite right to tell me. What did she tell you to buy?’

‘Here is the list.’

On the list were several pieces of linen, several dozen handkerchiefs, and a complete outfit of children’s underclothes.

They say that Caesar could read, write, and dictate at the same moment: this is somewhat the same versatility—to be able to think of thrifty means of obtaining linen and children’s stockings while lives are being ruined, and men are feeling the cold blade of Saturn’s scythe. The Germans are a glorious people!

* * * * *