Elective Affinities (29 page)

For his part, all this stayed within sensible and desirable bounds. His position, his circumstances, his aspirations and ambitions occupied him so fully he complaisantly accepted the lovely young lady’s friendship as a gratifying supplement without feeling himself involved with her in any way or begrudging her to her fiancé, with whom he was in any case on the best of terms.

With her, however, it was quite different. It seemed to her she had awakened from a dream. Her struggle against her young neighbour had been her life’s first passion, and this violent struggle had in fact been, in the guise of hostility, only a violent, as it were inborn affection. When she looked back, indeed, it seemed to her she had always loved him. She smiled at the way she had gone after him armed; she wanted to remember what a supremely pleasant sensation it had been when he had disarmed her. She imagined she had felt the greatest bliss when he tied her up and everything she had done to injure and annoy him now appeared to her as no more than an innocent means of attracting his attention.
She cursed their separation, she bewailed the sleep into which she had fallen, she execrated dull and dreamy habit, which had wedded her to so unprepossessing a groom. She was transformed, doubly transformed, in her past and in her future.

If anyone could have unearthed these feelings of hers, which she kept entirely to herself, he could not have blamed her for them: for indeed, when you saw them together her future bridegroom could not endure comparison with her young neighbour. You could not help feeling a certain confidence in the one, but the other inspired the most unbounded trust; you would have enjoyed the company of the one, but desired the other for a companion; and if it came to higher interests, exceptional circumstances, you would have had doubts about the one, complete certainty as to the other. Women have an innate feeling for such things, and they have reason as well as occasion for developing it.

The more the fair bride-to-be nourished these thoughts in her heart and the more impossible it was for anyone to say anything in favour of the bridegroom-to-be, of what circumstances and duty advised and commanded, or indeed of what an unalterable necessity seemed irrevocably to demand, the more enamoured of its own partiality this heart became; and since she was on the one hand indissolubly bound by her world and her family, by her future bridegroom and her own agreement, and on the other the rising young man made no secret of his future prospects and plans, comported himself towards her simply as a loyal and not even fond brother, and there was now even talk of his immediate departure, it seemed as if the childish spirit of earlier days, with all its violence and spite, awoke again in her, and now, at a higher stage of life, indignantly prepared itself for more pernicious action. She resolved to die, so as to punish him she had formerly hated and now so passionately loved for his coldness towards her and, since she was not to possess him, to wed herself
eternally to his imagination and remorse. Never should he be free of the image of her dead face, never should he cease to reproach himself that he had not recognized, had not fathomed, had not treasured her feelings towards him.

This strange madness went with her wherever she went. She concealed it in every way she could and, although people found her behaviour odd, no one was sufficiently attentive or astute to discover the true cause of it.

In the meantime, friends, relations and acquaintances had been putting themselves to no end of trouble to organize entertainments of all kinds. Hardly a day passed without there being arranged something new and unexpected. There was hardly a spot on the landscape that had not been adorned and prepared for the reception of merry guests. Our young arrival too wanted to play his part before his departure, and he invited the young couple and their immediate family for a pleasure trip on the river. They boarded a fine, well-appointed ship, a yacht of the sort that provides a small lounge and a number of cabins and seeks to transport the comforts of land on to the water.

They sailed down the great river to the accompaniment of music; in the heat of the day the company had assembled below to entertain themselves with games of chance and skill. The young host, who could never remain idle, had taken the tiller to relieve the aged ship’s captain, who had fallen asleep at his side; and at this time he needed all his wits about him, for they were approaching a spot where a pair of islands narrowed the river bed and their flat, pebbly banks, extending out into the water, produced a dangerous channel. The alert and cautious helmsman was almost tempted to awaken the captain, but he resolved to rely on his own skill and steered for the narrows. At that moment his lovely foe appeared on deck with a wreath of flowers in her hair, which she took off and threw at the helmsman. ‘This is to remember me by!’ she cried. ‘Don’t disturb me!’ he shouted back, taking up the
wreath. ‘I need all my strength and concentration.’ ‘I shall not disturb you again,’ she cried, ‘you shall see me no more!’ And so saying, she hastened to the ship’s prow and there leaped into the water. Voices cried: ‘Help! Help! She’s drowning!’ He was thrown into the most agonizing dilemma. The noise awakens the old captain; he tries to take over the tiller and the young man tries to relinquish it to him; but there is no time to change control: the ship runs ashore, and at the same instant, throwing off the weightier of his clothes, the young man plunged into the water and swam after his fair foe.

Water is a friendly element for him who is familiar with it and knows how to manage it. It bore him up and, as a skilled swimmer, he was its master. Soon he had reached the girl being borne away in front of him; he grasped her round, he was able to lift her up and support her; and both were borne violently away by the river, until they had left the islands far behind and the stream again began to flow broad and smooth. Only now did he recover from the first sense of emergency, in which he had acted mechanically and without thought, and take stock of their situation. Raising his head with difficulty above the water, he looked around and steered as well as he could towards a flat, bush-covered spot which ran conveniently down into the river. There he brought his fair booty to dry land; but he could feel in her not a breath of life. He was seized by despair, but then a well-trodden path leading through the undergrowth met his eyes. He lifted up the dear burden again, he soon saw a solitary house, and when he reached it he found good people there, a young married couple to whom he quickly told his tale of misfortune and who brought him everything he asked for: a fire was soon blazing, woollen blankets were spread over a bed, pelts and furs and other warming garments were quickly fetched forth. The desire to revive the lovely, benumbed, naked body overbore every other thought, and nothing was
left undone that might call it back to life. Their efforts succeeded. She opened her eyes, she beheld her friend, she embraced his neck with her ethereal arms. Long she held him, and a stream of tears poured from her eyes and completed her recovery. ‘Can you leave me,’ she cried, ‘now that I have found you again like this!’ ‘Never’, he cried, ‘never!’ and knew not what he said or did. ‘Only spare yourself,’ he added ‘spare yourself! Think of yourself, for your own sake and mine.’

She now regarded herself, and only now did she realize the state she was in. She could not feel shame before her darling, her rescuer; but she gladly released him so that he might look after himself, for everything he had on was still dripping wet.

The young married couple took counsel together and offered their wedding clothes, which were still hanging in the house complete and were sufficient to clothe two young people from head to foot. In a short time the two adventurers were not merely dressed but adorned. They looked delightful, gazed on one another in amazement when they met again and, although still half smiling at their fancy-dress, fell into one another’s arms in a passionate embrace. The energy of youth and the agitations of love had in a few minutes altogether restored them, and but for the absence of music they would have begun to dance.

To have made their way from water to earth, from death to life, from the family circle to the wilderness, from despair to rapture, from indifference to passionate affection, and all in a moment – the head is inadequate to grasp it without bursting. Here the heart must take its place and do the best it can if such events are to be borne.

Utterly lost in one another, it was only after some time that they could think of the fears and worries of those they had left behind, and they themselves could hardly help worrying about how they were to meet them again. ‘Shall we
flee? Shall we hide away?’ said the young man. ‘Let us stay together,’ she said, clinging to him.

The countryman, who had heard from them the story of the stranded ship, hurried without further ado down to the river bank. He saw the yacht come sailing happily along – it had, with considerable effort, been pushed loose. They were continuing uncertainly in hope of finding the two who were lost. So that when the countryman attracted their attention with shouts and gestures, ran to a spot where there appeared to be a good landing place, and continued to shout and gesture, the ship turned towards the bank, and what a scene there was when they landed! The parents of the bride- and bridegroom-to-be forced their way to the shore first; the loving bridegroom was almost out of his wits. Hardly had they learned that the dear children were safe when the latter emerged from behind a bush clad in their strange disguise. They did not recognize them until they had come right up. ‘Who is this?’ cried the mothers. ‘What is this?’ cried the fathers. The young people fell on their knees before them. ‘Your children!’ they exclaimed: ‘A loving pair. Forgive us!’ cried the girl. ‘Give us your blessing!’ cried the youth. ‘Give us your blessing!’ they both cried, as everyone around stood dumb with amazement. For a third time the words resounded: ‘Your blessing!’ And who could have had the heart to refuse them?

CHAPTER ELEVEN

T
HE
narrator paused, or had rather already finished, before he noticed how agitated Charlotte had become; now, indeed, she rose and, excusing herself with a gesture, left the room: for the tale was already familiar to her. The event described had actually happened and had involved the Captain and a woman neighbour of his; it is true it had not happened exactly as the Englishman had told it, but its main features were intact and only individual details had been developed and embellished, as tends to happen with tales of this sort when they have passed firstly through mouths of the crowd and subsequently through the fantasy of an imaginative and stylish narrator. For the most part everything and nothing remains in the end as it was.

Ottilie followed Charlotte, as the two strangers themselves desired, and now it was the nobleman’s turn to remark that perhaps another blunder had been made, something known to or even connected with the house spoken of. ‘We must beware,’ he went on, ‘that we do not do any more harm. We seem to be making an ill return for the many good and pleasant things we have enjoyed here. Let us find a polite way of taking our leave.’

‘I must confess,’ his companion replied, ‘that there is something else that detains me here, something I should like to have explained before I leave. When we took the
camera obscura
to the park yesterday you were too busy, my lord, in finding a truly picturesque view to have noticed what was going on otherwise. You turned aside from the main path so as to get to a little-visited spot beside the lake which offered you a charming prospect. Ottilie, who accompanied us, hesitated to follow, and asked to be allowed to go there in the
boat. I sat with her and was delighted with the skilful way she handled it. I assured her I had not been so pleasantly rocked on the water since I was in Switzerland, where charming young ladies also play the role of ferryman, but I could not refrain from asking her why it really was she had refused to take that side path, for there had in fact been a kind of anxious embarrassment in her refusal. “So long as you won’t laugh at me,” she replied amicably, “I can tell you, although even for me there is a mystery about it. I have never taken that bypath without being seized by a quite peculiar feeling of dread which I never feel anywhere else and which I do not know how to explain. I therefore prefer to avoid laying myself open to such a sensation, especially as it is immediately followed by a headache on the left side which I suffer from now and again on other occasions.” –We landed, you and Ottilie conversed, and I, in the meanwhile, examined the spot she had clearly pointed out to me from a distance. Imagine my astonishment when I discovered a very clear indication of the presence of coal, which convinced me that excavation there might well reveal a lucrative seam below.

‘Forgive me, my lord: I see you smiling and know full well you condone my passionate interest in these things, in which you have no belief, only as a man of wisdom and as a friend; but it is impossible for me to depart from here without trying the pendulum experiment on Ottilie.’

When this subject came up for discussion the nobleman never failed to reiterate his arguments against it, which his companion always received with patience and discretion, but still persevered in his opinions and intentions. He likewise repeatedly maintained that the subject ought not to be abandoned because such experiments as this did not succeed with everyone; indeed, for that very reason it ought to be the more seriously and thoroughly investigated, since many connections and affinities between inorganic materials, between
inorganic and organic, and between organic and organic, which were at present concealed from us, would certainly be disclosed in the future.

He had already set out his apparatus of gold rings and pieces of iron and sulphur ore and other metallic substances which he always carried with him in a handsome little chest, and was now holding pieces of metal attached to thread over other pieces of metal. ‘I do not begrudge you the pleasure I read on your face, my lord,’ he said as he did so, ‘when you think that nothing is going to move here for me. My operations are, however, only a subterfuge. When the ladies return I want them to be curious about the strange things we are engaged on.’