As to myself, I certainly had no intention of refraining from visiting the scene of combat. That would have been absurd, and besides, what was about to happen attracted me mightily. I was certainly obliged to go and look at everything, now that I had heard all about it—that was a kind of moral obligation, which, however, was forced to contend hardily with other rebellious emotions: with a great shyness and shame, unpugnacious and faint of heart as I was, to venture upon the scene of such virile deeds; a nervous fear of the upheavals which the sight of a grim battle, in dead earnest and, so to speak, to the death, might provoke in me. These upheavals I experienced in anticipation, and also a simple, craven fear that, once there and tarred with the same brush, I might be exposed to demands and challenges which were repugnant to my inmost nature, an anxiety that I might be forced to prove that I too on my part was a dashing fellow, something which I abhorred more than anything. On the other hand, I could not help putting myself in Jappe’s and Do Escobar’s place, and inwardly feeling the devastating emotions which I presupposed in them. I imagined the insult and the challenge in the Kurgarten, and with them I suppressed, for reasons of elegance and savoir faire, the urge to start pummelling with my fists. I experienced the passion of their indignant, outraged sense of justice, the grief, the throbbing, brain-searing hate, the attacks of raving impatience and revenge amidst which they must have spent the night. Then, driven to extremes, and borne beyond all timorousness, I began in spirit to fight blindly and bloodily with an opponent just as dehumanized as myself, drove my fist into his hateful mouth with all the power at my command, so that all his teeth were shattered, received in return a brutal kick in the abdomen, and went down in red waves, whereupon I awoke in my bed, with quieted nerves and ice-packings amidst the gentle reproaches of my family. In short, when it got to be half past eleven and we got up to dress ourselves, I was half exhausted by excitement, and in the dressing-room, as well as afterwards when we left the bathing-establishment fully dressed, my heart beat just as though it were I who was to fight Jappe or Do Escobar, in public and under arduous conditions.
I still remember perfectly how we three went down the narrow plank gangway which led up from the beach to the bathing-establishment. We hopped, of course, so as to make the gangway sway up and down and let us balance upon it, as upon a springboard. Having reached the sands, we did not follow the boardwalk which ran along the beach between the pavilions and the wicker beach-chairs, but struck inland, somewhat in the direction of the Kurhaus, but a little more to the left. The sun brooded upon the sand-dunes and coaxed a dry and heated fragrance from the sand-thistles and the reeds which grew in the sparse and arid soil and pricked our legs. Nothing was to be heard save the uninterrupted buzzing of horseflies of a metallic blue, which apparently stood immovably in the heavy heat, and then suddenly changed their position and resumed their sharp and monotonous song in another place. The cooling effect of the bath was long since past. Brattström and I now and then took off our head-coverings—he his Swedish skipper’s cap with its projecting visor of oilcloth, I my round Heligoland woollen cap, a so-called tam-o’-shanter—and mopped the sweat from our foreheads. Johnny suffered very little from the heat, thanks to his thinness, and no doubt also because his clothes were more elegantly adapted to the summer weather than our own. He walked on between Brattström and me, clad in his light and comfortable sailor’s suit of striped washable goods, his throat and calves bare, his blue sailor’s cap, with its short ribbons and its English inscription, perched upon his pretty little head, his long and slender feet in white kid ties with scarcely a trace of heel. And so he walked with a lengthy, climbing stride and with knees that seemed a little crooked, and with that agreeable accent of his sang a popular song, “O Little Fisher Maiden!” which was current at that time, sang it with an indecent variation, which had been invented by the precocious youth. That was the way he was: despite all his childishness, he already knew various things and was not at all too squeamish to speak of them. But then he would put on a light hypocritical mien and say: “Shame! one ought not to sing such nasty songs!” and pretend that it was we and not himself who had so salaciously apostrophized the little fisher maiden.
I myself had not the slightest inclination for singing, for we were already close to the place of rendezvous and the fateful theatre of combat. The sharp grass of the sand-dunes had changed to sandy moss, to a kind of meagre meadow land—this was the Leuchtenfeld which we were traversing, so named after the round, yellow lighthouse tower which lifted itself at a considerable distance to the left—and so quite unexpectedly we arrived at our goal.
It was a warm and peaceful place, very little frequented by people and hidden from view by brushwood willows. In the clearing within the line of willow-bushes were sitting and lying a
