gnädige Frau, I was dropped on the floor as a little child; it comes from that.”
“And how old are you now?” she went on.
“Thirty years, gnädige Frau.”
“Thirty years,” she repeated. “And you have not been happy, these thirty years?”
Herr Friedemann shook his head, and his lips quivered. “No,” said he; “that was falsehood and imagination.”
“So you believed you were happy?” she asked.
“I tried to,” he said, and she replied:
“That was brave.”
A minute went by. Only the crickets chirped, and behind them the trees rustled very softly.
“I understand a little about unhappiness,” she then said. “Such summer nights along the water are the best thing for it.”
He did not reply to this, but pointed with a feeble gesture to the other bank, which lay peacefully in the dark.
“I sat there the other day,” he said.
“After you left me?” she asked.
He merely nodded.
Then suddenly he sprang up from his seat, sobbed, gave vent to a cry, a cry of complaint which at the same time had something liberating in it, and sank slowly to the ground at her feet. He had touched her hand with his, as it rested on the bench beside him, and while he held it fast, while he seized the other also, while this quite deformed little man lay twitching and quivering upon his knees before her and buried his face in her lap, he stammered in a hoarse, inhuman voice: “You know it—let me—I can’t go on—my God—my God—”
She did not resist him, nor did she bend down to him. She sat fully erect, leaning a little away from him, and her small eyes, which lay so close together and in which the damp shimmer of the water seemed to mirror itself, stared fixedly straight in front of her, over his head, into the distance.
And then suddenly, with a jerk, with a short, proud, contemptuous laugh, she had torn her hands from his hot fingers, had seized his arm, thrown him sideways flat upon the ground, sprung up, and vanished in the avenue.
He lay there, his face in the grass, stunned, beside himself; and every moment a quiver went through his body. He drew himself together, made two steps, and fell to the ground once more. He lay close to the water.
What actually went on in him during what followed now? Perhaps it was that voluptuous hate which he had felt when she humiliated him by her look, a hate which now, as he lay on the ground, after being treated by her like a dog, resolved itself into an insane fury, which called for action, even though it should be against himself—perhaps disgust at himself, which filled him with a thirst to destroy himself, to tear himself to pieces, to extinguish himself.
He pushed himself still further forward upon his stomach, lifted the upper part of his body, and let it fall into the water. He did not lift his head again; he did not once move his legs, which lay on the bank.
At the splashing of the water the crickets had for a moment grown silent. Now their chirping began again, the park rustled softly, and down through the long avenue came subdued laughter.
Little Louise
There are marriages the origin of which not even the most practised literary imagination could possibly conceive. One must accept them as one accepts adventurous combinations of contrary qualities in the theatre—such as old and stupid with beautiful and vivacious—which are given as assumptions and serve as the basis for the mathematical composition of a farce.
As to the wife of Herr Jacoby, counsellor-at-law, she was young and beautiful, a woman of unusual charms. Some, let us say, thirty years ago she had been christened with the names Anna, Marguerite, Rose, Amalie, but she had always been called Amra, a name composed of the initial letters of all these names, a name which with its exotic ring fitted her personality like no other. For though the darkness of her thick, soft hair, which was parted on the side and drawn back along both sides of her narrow forehead, was only the darkness of the chestnut kernel, her skin revealed a perfect southern smooth and shadowy olive, and this skin covered contours which also seemed to have ripened in a southern sun, and which reminded one of the vegetative and lazy voluptuousness of a sultana. This impression, which was provoked by all of her indolent, sensual movements, also coincided with the likelihood that her reason was subordinated to her heart. One look from her ingenuous, brown eyes, as she drew up her pretty eyebrows towards her almost pathetically low forehead in her original way, was enough to convince one of that. But she, too, knew this—she was not too simple for that—she simply avoided exposing herself, by speaking little and seldom; and there is nothing to be said against a woman who is pretty and silent. Oh, that word “simple” was surely least expressive of her. Her look was not only foolish, but also of a certain avid slyness, and one could see plainly that this woman was not too limited in intellect to be inclined to make trouble.—As for the rest, her nose seen in profile may have been a bit too large and fleshy; but her broad, full mouth was quite perfect, even though without any expression save that of sensuality.
This perilous woman was the wife of Counsellor-at-law Jacoby, who was about forty years of age—and whoever saw him was astounded. He was stout, was the counsellor-at-law, he was more than stout; he was a veritable colossus of a man! His legs, which were always clad in ash-grey trousers, reminded one by their columnar formlessness of those of an elephant; his back, rounded by bolsters of fat, was like that of a bear; and the queer grey-green knitted jacket which he was accustomed to wear was fastened so painfully across the monstrous curve of his stomach, by a single button, that
