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Chapter 11The MiracleDAS WUNDER

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Yes, that autumn and winter became the most deeply stirring of my whole life.

At first this correspondence was so cordially harmless, so genuinely friendly. The greetings to Oswald were genuine. For them he had his old shrug of the shoulders. When the letters began to come more often, I asked him to read them too, so that he might see how highly this outstanding man thought of me. He smiled: “Novelist's phrases that a writer smears round your mouth do not interest me.”

So from then on I read my letters alone, and passed on no more greetings either; they only raised a smile. And when anemones came as well, dear, beautiful Riviera flowers packed in cotton wool, Oswald's scorn knew no bounds. “The fellow will turn your head completely yet; you are conceited enough as it is.”

But the letters and the flowers became more and more a deep joy to me, a secret source of strength in my dreary everyday life. For a long time we spoke in them only of general things; I did not touch on my marriage at all. Then one day I wrote: “Our marriage is what people generally call a happy one, but I believe there is no such thing at all as a really happy life together in marriage; only an understanding in which the one bears and endures everything with the other.” —

And then everything came as it had to come from the very beginning, when the circles of two natures inwardly akin in soul touch each other at any point. Such natures are drawn magnetically to one another, whether they will or no. I wrote at the time:

Spring Fantasy

When I look out and see the green buds that stir in their thousands on the bushes, it fills me with a longing I have never known: — soon the blessing of spring will shower over them! When I look in, into the workshop of my life — by day, by night, I feel it everywhere: with every pulse-beat this mad longing grows! Woe is me, my heart! It beats towards yours alone!

My married life meanwhile grew ever sadder. Oswald and I were walking home one winter evening, through the snow. Over some matter of no importance it came to a quarrel. My husband gave me a shove. I fell to the ground.

The next day he said I was not to play the injured party now; it was all for my own good, this “well-deserved chastisement.”1

Soon Telmann was describing to me his whole life and loving, from earliest youth onward. And his grave and almost hopeless illness. “Never will a loving woman rest at my side, never will a child's little arms go round me.” Then I began to weigh things up: there was a man to whom I could give happiness and bliss, and here was another dissatisfied with me in the depths of his soul. What was I to him? What should I be taking from him if I went away from him? Really that would have been my duty long ago, for I no longer loved him. Had I ever loved him at all? I had probably only loved love. But I was far too cowardly to go on bearing a life without any companionship whatever, so entirely alone! And there were the children, for whom I had to preserve their father!

But now, the more I looked into Telmann's soul, the deeper I sank myself in the miracle of its beauty, the clearer it became to me how I hungered and starved at my husband's side, who denied me and my whole nature. And more and more I recognised how immoral, at bottom, our marriage was2.

And then — I no longer know how it came about — Konrad Telmann confessed his love to me. And I sent him a jubilant answer. But at that he was shaken through and through by such a roaring bliss: — “Sometimes I should like to shout it out into the waves that roll in against the shore today so blue and glorious, to send it up in a shout of joy to the roof of heaven — and then again to shield it carefully and cover it over and veil it, because it is far too precious and wonderful for the world and wants to burst my own breast apart. That there should be such a thing in the world! It is simply a destiny! Like the boy in the Goethe-Eckermann conversations I have sat at the wayside and waited for my destiny, long, long. And now destiny has come, and I can go and die. There is nothing higher for me on earth any more!”

I had asked Telmann to send his letters poste restante from now on — I could no longer have borne Oswald's criticism of them. What was to happen I did not yet know. Only one thing was clear to me — after this there could be no marital communion with Oswald any more; it would have seemed to me an enormous immorality. — But the beloved was mortally ill and had to be guarded from every agitation. Besides, he was convinced in the depths of his being that for me a life at his side, in a “dreary Riviera spot,” without intellectual and artistic stimulus, would be an impossibility, and that in other respects too he could offer a beloved woman nothing, not even a healthy body and a life free of care.

And yet — I knew it — there I brought happiness and bliss, there I fulfilled my innermost life, which at Oswald's side was slowly, uselessly withering away. — The children? I loved them — I thought: perhaps we can share them3.

It was a hard task for me to convince Konrad Telmann that my one happiness lay at his side. He could not grasp that I was willing to bring “the mortally ill man the enormous sacrifice” of breaking with my whole earlier life and becoming his wife.

At last, after I had written my fingers almost raw, he began to grasp that for me happiness and the possession of him really were one and the same. An energy he had never known swelled his heart. His work as an artist grew in force and depth. It was then that he began the novel “Unter den Dolomiten.”

I too had become a new person. An irrevocable resolve filled my soul. All softness, all hesitation had fallen away from me. The miracle had come over me, my soul had grown strong in happiness. Those verses of mine speak the mood of those days to the life:

Serenade

When the silver light of early morning kisses my eyes so that I wake — caught in dream then, and quite bewildered, looking at the day with no memory yet: there comes to my ear a soft twittering of birds sweetly across, as out of a great distance. Smiling, I close my eyes again then, dream of you, already half awake, that it was you who sent me the birds of spring to bring all their songs to my day.

And

April

When I go of an evening through the quiet lanes, where a little garden greens before every house, and on the bushes the tiniest of buds, each one of them hiding a spring inside it — where the rose-bushes, freed of their straw, stand upright in the beds again, and the song of blackbird and of thrush, jubilant, lamenting, with the scent of violets, softly breathing itself out into the spring air — then always, always I must think it: when the sweet scent of violets has drifted away, when little by little the birds' song has fallen silent, when the roses stand in full bloom, I shall lie, struck dumb with happiness, at your heart!

So one morning I told Oswald the full truth, how it had all come about and developed in the soul, and that I must go away from him, because I no longer loved him and could never be anything to him; because everything I had gone without at his side had only become perfectly clear to me through Konrad's love and understanding.

He was as though struck by lightning. He wailed and wept, fell at my feet, threatened me afresh with a bullet through his head. As he had done years before, at the courtship.

But he could not move me any more. It all seemed to me so hollow. — Oswald pulled himself together. But from then on he was as if transformed.

The next morning he asked me to come for a walk. He directed his steps towards the cemetery, to the mortuary. A black-bearded dead man was lying there. “That man died loveless,” he said, “as I too shall die one day, when you go away from me — that is my picture of the future.” It could not shake me, I was proof against it. — A few weeks earlier I had taken a larger studio outside the house in order to finish my picture of “Irene von Spilimberg” (which years later was sold to the picture gallery in Metz4). Oswald now began to accompany me there every morning. Of my resolve we spoke not one word — he was courting me again, as in the first days. —

One cheerful event from that time has stayed with me out of all the agitation.

One day I had scarcely taken off hat and coat in the new studio when there came a shy knock at the door.

I had already been told that in this house the models were particularly importunate. So I bellow out crossly: “Don't need a model!”

After a while there was another knock, somewhat louder. Again I call out that I do not need a model.

Whereupon, after a little pause, a modest: “It is not a model, it is I.” — — “Who is the I?” I call out crossly. “The Prince Regent!” —

Now and then in later years, when he opened a Munich exhibition of mine, the kindly, exalted gentleman, we laughed together over the “Don't need a model!” —

Now he too has gone to sleep — like all my friends, one after another. Only my enemies threaten me in a closed phalanx. —

Riviera flowers came again from Konrad. They were my consolation. Out of their scent I drew courage and strength and sweet, sweet promise of the future.

In Your Flowers

My head in your flowers, in tears; out of their scent something rises like a consuming longing, sultry, into the air. And steals my sleep and steals my peace, breathes hot about me — how desolate it is, parted from you, I know, I know. Darkness all round, silence all round, nothing gives me strength, what is duty now, what is the will of passion? Veiled she comes, and quiet and friendly, in pleasure and in jest — whoever has known her, into his heart she drives the steel like an enemy. She lies down beside me on the pillow and whispers to me: even if in death — to know yourselves united, that alone gives rest!

When Oswald saw that my resolve was unshakeable, he wrote to Konrad that my mind must for the moment be under a delusion. They should meet and take counsel about the immediate future.

Konrad's heart was diseased and he had to avoid all agitation; he therefore declined a meeting in person and said that all decisions could just as well be reached in writing. But he was convinced that I had been unhappy at my husband's side, that this was no moral marriage — and that for that reason he would never renounce the woman who loved him.

Oswald insisted that nothing had come over me but a momentary derangement of the mind. In solitude I should soon come to myself again. He demanded three months of solitude for me, with no letters from either side. Konrad went along with this proposal, on condition that he and I should talk it through beforehand in Zürich. His mother's presence would be a guarantee of everything. After long hesitation, when Oswald saw that Konrad would never give up this condition of a talk between the two of us first, he consented. A few days before my departure — I pitied his position without my pecuniary support — I said to him: “There are still eight hundred marks lying in the Vereinsbank. Here is a cheque, if you need it.”

I laid it on the table. He flared up: he wanted nothing of it. — — A couple of months later I went to draw out the money he had refused — and it turned out that he had cashed it eight days after I left.

The inheritance-aunt Ueberson, by the way, did him the favour of dying soon after I went away; she settled a legacy on him of three thousand marks a year. It was not much, but at least the children did not have to go short. A stone fell from my heart. Though of course, if it had happened a couple of years earlier, much sorrow would have been spared me.

And the day of departure came. At nine in the evening my train left for Lindau. I took only a little luggage with me. For the last time I stood in front of my children's beds5. They were already asleep. My heart was like a stone. Ah, later it was to wake over these children only too thoroughly, in bitter pain.

Then Oswald took me to the station after all. He even carried my hand luggage, would not be dissuaded from it — which he had never once done before.

I sat in the carriage. He pressed my hand and said with emphasis: “The Lord enlighten thee!” My hand lay cold as marble in his.

In the morning I crossed Lake Constance at sunrise. And suddenly it was as though I were reading all this in a novel6. —

In the afternoon, in Zürich, I lay in Konrad's arms. His mother seemed kind, but frightened. In the souls of the two of us, though, there was a clarity that nothing could weigh down.

Never to Be Grasped

Never to be grasped, that you love me, that you give me love in exchange for suffering. Never to be spoken, the whole of the delight, never to be borne by a human breast. Never to be shunned, in guilt and pain. Never to be parted, heart now from heart.

After three days in which we enjoyed a blessed peace of heart — he read me glorious poems just out — I basked doubly in his fullness of creation, after Oswald's artistic impotence of creation — I travelled on to Paris.

The World's Fair was on there just then7. I had never before felt so “fallen out of the nest” as in that surging of masses. Then I went on to Yport near Fécamp in Normandy.

I took lodgings in the last fisherman's cottage. I saw nobody, I spoke with nobody but the waitress in the little country inn; I was to come to myself again, after all.

Oswald had meanwhile travelled to Darmstadt to my parents, to tell them that I wanted to leave him in a fit of insanity. They were to teach me reason again.

The indignant letters were not slow in coming, one of them from my friend Ernst von M.8, who from a safe distance gave notice of the end of our friendship on the grounds of my insanity.

Meanwhile the wildest rumours about my sudden departure were whirring about Munich, among them that I had run off with the Prince of M. Which gave my husband the opportunity of showing himself with the said prince, arm in arm, in the Maximilianstraße. — Meanwhile the days and nights in Yport — without any news at all from the old home or the new — stretched out for me into eternities. How many poems of my “Via passionis”9 were wrung out of my deepest distress of soul there, among them:

Stocks

You know it: with every breath, awake, I think of you. How does it come about, then, that your image always fled before my dreams? My head lies heavy on the tumbled pillows, awake with longing, why is it that the dream-god's wing throws no shadow, that you do not follow after? By the bed the stocks you sent are breathing a sweetness like no other, why is it that when the poppy scatters its grains of slumber I lose them? — All our deadly happiness, I feel it, rests only a little while; grudging Sleep, why do you begrudge the dreamer his bliss?

My rigidity had fallen away from me again. I even began to suffer over what I had done to Oswald. That was not good. I wrote him a humanly conciliatory letter, which he played off against Konrad and my parents. Here, you could see it: it had only been a momentary derangement, and I was coming to my senses again. In truth I was as clear and as resolved as I had ever been; only my poor beloved suffered unspeakably, and quite needlessly, from this soft-hearted impulse of mine. But all that I learned only later.

For the time being I longed my days and nights away — painting, writing verse, weeping. I often went out to the black cliffs, not far from my hut.

“Every summer evening I lie here, watch the ball of the sun go down in the sea — among the black, god-forsaken cliffs this god-forsaken heart seeks its comfort.” —

But it was only longing for the beloved — no torment of doubt about what I had to do — that made me so helpless and unhappy.

At last — the waiting time had only a few days left to run — I wrote to Konrad that if he did not write by return I should have to die. And to Oswald: “Today I am as clear as I was on the first day about what I must do.”

Suddenly a letter came from Konrad — it was with him as it was with me — he leapt over the barrier of the last few days. Then I held out no longer; I telegraphed him: “I am coming to you.” He was in Grindelwald with his mother. But just as I am about to leave I receive a desperate note from him: “Now it is all over, you still love your husband, farewell.”

I wrote to him the whole night through, to make everything psychologically clear to him, including my spark of pity for the man who was still called my husband today, sent the letter by express post and departed.

At Interlaken the dearest one took me silently into his arms. Then we drove on to his mother. She had lovingly prepared a little room for me at the Pension Schönegk; Konrad had decorated it with flowers. On the bed lay a poem in his own hand: “The cry of pain of my soul has died away — welcome!”

So now I had found my way home, into my true homeland of the soul; but how much there was still to do before we could belong to each other in the sight of all the world. —

After supper the two of us went out onto the darkening meadows, wreathed round with glaciers. The glitter of the stars shimmered on the eternal ice. It was a night divinely sublime. We said not a word, we only held each other silently by the hand — come home! —

Evening wind in the leaves of dark roses, breathing and blowing and churning the waves of scent — so are your kisses! The bristling bee that in the heather flowers sucks a summer-heavy, sultry sweetness — so are your kisses! The tiger that into frightened human lips drives his wild fangs of death — so are your kisses!

We spent glorious weeks at Grindelwald. Konrad always urged me to climb the mountains; but he had to stay down below with his diseased lung. That made us both sad. The world of the glaciers was gigantic. Konrad was writing at the novel “Zwischen den Gletschern,” and I painted alpine flowers.

His sister and her husband, the later Admiral von H.10, at that time a corvette captain, came to visit. — Both the H.s were to become my enemies later on.

Since no external ground for divorce existed, a malicious desertion had to be manufactured11; the business would take a long time, but with Konrad's mother as chaperone the world could hardly take offence at a friendship so extremely formal on the outside.

We went together to Lake Lugano, to the Villa Castagnola. After that to Lago Maggiore. How I enjoyed the beauty of the world at the beloved's side! Then we travelled by way of Milan to Nice. Frau Justizrat12 rented the Villa Primatice, built in its day by Meissonier, and from her I rented a bedroom and the enormous studio. It was all furnished in the most artistic way, with nothing but antiques, collected by a former opera singer, Madame Vivès. Off the studio was a large hothouse, and in the middle of it stood a marble Venus after Canova. I bought palms, planted a few hundred hyacinth bulbs in pots. It was like a fairy tale. We both threw ourselves into work, Konrad and I. His mother had her German maid come out and kept house herself! That time seems to me now like an improbable dream. We also had a large garden with orange and lemon trees, many camellias in flower and heliotrope as tall as a man. We made frequent excursions into the glorious country round about. To the abandoned little medieval town of Châteauneuf, from whose height we counted twenty-two snow mountains.

Yes — the world was unspeakably beautiful. And yet I had my grief as well. I longed for the children. I dreamed of them at night.

Today in a Dream

Today in a dream I walked the old ways to you, in a grey night of rain, to you, my everlastingly lost ones, whom I love. God, my witness, hears how I fought for you, how I suffered, how I almost broke. — Now, cut loose, the tangled skein of our destinies unwinds, far from each other, far, worlds apart! But in the dream I walked the old streets. It was dark, the rain came rushing down. Secretly I unlocked the door of the house, softly up the stairs I crept, and I stood and listened outside the door, softly and secretly, trembling to be found out, your mother, come to hold you tenderly. — And you came! You flew into my arms, and I held you, wordless, sobbing, shaking. — Then secretly again, as I had come, I stride alone into the night of rain, far and further off. — But I take it for a sign: one day, in years to come, when you are free and grown and can judge for yourselves whether guilt or destiny13 drove you away into the wide world, then I shall stand before you once more, children, wide open, hot with a mother's longing, my arms — ah, you fly to my heart. Wordless, blessed, I shall hold for ever my children, my sweet children! —

Through the “malicious desertion” I had, without suspecting it, forfeited my right to them. And the divorce stretched out beyond all foreseeing. — In the summer Konrad went with his mother to the Plättig in the Black Forest and then on to her property at Höckendorf. She had invited me to follow them there.

Before that I was with my parents, who made my situation anything but easier.

Höckendorf enchanted me. A Biedermeier country house with genuine Biedermeier rooms, a green-mossed thatched roof under thousand-year-old lime trees whose branches lay across the roof and trailed on the ground. Through the whole house there reigned a golden-green twilight. I arrived just at the time of the lime blossom. Konrad said that Höckendorf and its limes had made a poet of him. It lay near Stettin, and the park went over into the “Buchhaide.” A true poet's seat. For generations the eldest son had always become “Justizrat” and owned Höckendorf. Konrad was the youngest son, an utter departure from the type, and positively hated all patrician arrogance. His relations were outraged about me! A divorced woman, an artist, was to enter their correct family! No, they were not amiable; they hate me to this day — every one of them who is still alive. Not even the fact of our later, so unspeakably happy marriage could get that hatred out of the world. I was glad when I was away from Höckendorf again. That second autumn we meant to go to Nervi. Frau Justizrat rented an apartment in the Villa Gropallo. The huge park was at our free disposal. I took a room and a studio for myself in an Italian palazzo and came to my own people for dinner; afterwards we went together to the incomparably beautiful wild rocky shore, ate supper together again, and at nine o'clock “Auguste” took me back home along the sea path with its wild surf. Everything went very properly; we were both very industrious too, but we longed, from the depths of our souls, for a union in marriage at last. Here nobody suspected that we belonged to each other. That was why, already at Nice, a friend of Konrad's youth had confessed her love to him and offered him her hand, and had almost taken her own life when he refused her. Here in Nervi two ladies were staying. They had designs on my beloved and pursued him systematically. Once they came to visit me in my studio with him and his mother. Konrad had stayed behind afterwards to kiss me in secret, however fleetingly. The one young lady had looked round and seen it. In the night the poor creature became raving mad and had to be carried off with a doctor and a nurse. — —

I had found very good motifs in an orange garden and painted two large pictures. “Dattura am Brunnen” and “Orangenernte.”14 I sold them quite well later on. — —

The divorce was at last carried through, and in the summer we were to be married before the registrar in Constance. But it took an eternity, and caused endless trouble, before we had the necessary papers together.

In the spring I had been in Munich once more, to see the children again. It was very agitating. All the old friends had become my enemies. The divorced woman is always in the wrong. The most hostile of all were the Heyses and Amelie Godin15. The world is eternally short-sighted. All my Berlin friends too had already fallen away from me. Except the Spielhagens, who were of course close friends of Konrad's. But once again I learned to look deep into human souls, which almost always judge by the seeming and so very, very seldom by the being. A woman who has herself divorced is condemned16.

I smiled at it and thought to myself that in such people I had lost nothing. But the first meeting again with my children in Munich was very painful. At Nervi I had written this:

“In the dream of night, the long way, you come and give me sorrow to drink. On the wound of my soul I lay both your little hands. Then, when the morning sun hems the snow-crowned peaks, and the sea foams at my feet, I bow my forehead, weeping. One thing only digs and cries in my heart: with those children's hands of yours you can, in night and darkness, turn my bright destiny away.” —

Amelie Godin brought the children to Prince Ernst's studio, where I was to see them. I had brought them all sorts of things; they granted me half an hour, no more. But five minutes before the time was up the Godin woman tore them out of my arms. The children cried and were very upset. Oswald used that to prevent a second meeting. Then I wanted to meet Ada-Mucki outside her school, and waited a long time that seemed to me an eternity. She appeared at last, on Frau Godin's hand, who dragged her past me almost by force. Yes — I suffered a great deal in those days. Later the lawyer wrote that the meeting had thoroughly upset the children, and that for the next few years it must therefore be dispensed with.

I waited until the year of Konrad's death, but then, after he died, I was so distraught that I forgot everything else. —

I never saw the children again — I know nothing of them, and heard only once that Botho wanted to become a painter17. — Has this murderous war perhaps long since put him out? Whose destiny is as improbable as mine? — — —

At Constance Konrad and I went to the forest inn zum Jakob, where we spent idyllic weeks; but one morning my future mother-in-law surprised me with the proposal that she should come with us on the honeymoon. When I answered that in that case I should not go, she said, offended, “but I am always with you now as it is.” — To which I replied: “Yes, because just now you happen to be a necessary evil.” She held that against me for a long time. —

At the “Jakob” I painted a great deal of giant red poppies and red cactus in green-glazed pots. I was always industrious as an artist; otherwise I should have been perpetually unsatisfied.

On St. John's Day Konrad and I became man and wife. I had given him an antique torso as my wedding present, and these verses:

So the day has come, and to reach it we set a world on fire, exulting, the world that fate piled up between us as an enemy. So the day has come, the new life, each at the other's breast now, until death, before all eyes, free and true and proud. No outward splendour, no festal rejoicing — as with other couples — consecrates our future. We walk aside from the broad road, our own way, the only true one for us. So take it, then, flowered over with blossom, the marble torso out of sunken ages, the torso of all the beauty of this being. Ah, human life is patchwork after all18, and human happiness is patchwork after all. So take out of my hand, out of my soul, all that I have and am, my whole self. Show yourself a true poet in your life as well — and build your world for yourself out of the torso.

To the civil ceremony there came, as the only representative of our family, good Aunt Ottilie.

After a nice little meal Konrad and I, man and wife at last, went by steamer to the Reichenau. In a week we were to meet his mother at Höckendorf. In spite of that she ran up and down the quay wringing her hands and sobbing aloud, quite desperate. Aunt Ottilie had a hard time of it with her. — But we: “with dark festival roses at our breasts we landed on the Reichenau, just in the season of roses.”

On the Reichenau we took two rooms opening into each other, with bed-linen checked in red and white. Konrad was exhausted to death, had gone to bed early and slept till morning. I sat bolt upright on my couch and had really imagined my wedding night rather differently. But the malice of inanimate objects pursued us.

On the second night, on the Hohentwiel, Konrad's bed collapsed, and he had heart trouble.

When we had duly arrived at Höckendorf, the “old lady,” as Konrad called his mother, had put her bedroom between his and mine. She was thus something like the angel with the flaming sword. And in the mornings she lay in wait for him to wake and then planted herself on his bed with the speed of the wind. Once I had got in ahead of her and was already sitting in her place. At that she ran out crying. — She was a kindly old woman, but she made life after the wedding unnecessarily hard for me. Perhaps I took it too tragically as well. I think of it more calmly now; but at the time I was jealous of her. She was the one darkness in the short radiant sun of our marriage!

In the autumn the three of us moved to Rome and took a furnished apartment in the Palazzo Aragno, on the Corso. There too the morning scenes at her son's bed repeated themselves. We both worked, and at twelve o'clock the old lady was to fetch us. From half past eleven onwards she was walking up and down, booted and spurred, on the great terrace in front of our windows. On the way to our eating-house, the Faggiano, Konrad led his mother on his arm, and I could run along behind. I took all this far too hard. One morning I ran out of the house and roamed the streets full of despair until eleven at night. I had really meant to stay away all night, but could not bring myself to it. When I came home I found my husband dissolved in mortal terror.

“She must go,” he said.

But the next day she was thoroughly cowed, and for a little while it went better. She got on my nerves to such a degree that I simply said to her: “I shall throw myself off the terrace if you do not leave.”

“Very well, I shall go,” she said. I quickly got her the ticket, and she remarked that I had never been so amiable to her before. After she left I breathed again and slowly came back into my rights. She never came to Rome again after that; at Höckendorf, though, in her own household, the two of us got on much better. Konrad and I shortened the time together the following summer, by the way, with a jaunt to Heringsdorf and with the brilliant writers' day in Hamburg. There we got to know Gustav Falcke, made friends with Michael Georg Conrad and with the inspired Holger Drachmann, and were still living in the remembered horror of the frightful cholera time19, which every Hamburger described to us and which we pictured to ourselves gruesomely, in the worst quarters of the city. —

In the middle of September we were back in Rome, looked for and found a very pretty apartment in the Via Gregoriana. Now I took Konrad out to Castel Gandolfo. But I hunted up Empire furniture from the second-hand dealer myself and fitted out a comfortable nest for us! The duplicity of events took hold of me. Had I not done all this once before? On Sundays I went out to visit the beloved at Castel Gandolfo. — It was all quite strenuous, for we were expecting our first child in November. But at last everything was ready; I led Konrad in triumph into our apartment, and had hired an old cook as well, the “vecchia Maria” from the Abruzzi. My husband was happy. No, there were none of the ill humours there had been in the old days, when I was preparing the home for Oswald. And how much more richly the apartment in the Findlingstraße had been furnished, with fine silver and armorial furniture. Oswald enjoys both of them to this day. Some of my old rococo furniture I had at any rate asked to have back after the divorce; the Roman home had now become a very charming artist's home. —

But it had been high time. —

On the fourth of November Konrad, on account of a bad migraine, went to sleep at six o'clock. Then the labour pains came. I sent for the levatrice, and the next morning, when the “Sor Dottore” rang for his breakfast, Maria was able to serve him the newborn child on the tray. “Ecco la collazione!” His astonishment! — But I was happy that I could spare him the anxious hours of the birth. Ah, it did not come easily to me, but I was rewarded beyond measure. That was our beloved Helga20, “la piccola Maria Stuart,” as the wise woman called her, because of a little jacket with a big ruff. —

That too was a double play of events — the birth of a girl in Rome! But how different it all was this time! — I was quite able to nurse the sweet thing myself; but my husband was afraid it would tax me too much, and asked me to give the child the bottle alongside. But little Helga and I, we were so much in love with each other. We still possessed each other in secret every night. The loved one would lie at my breast and suck and suck — with all its might! It throve gloriously on it; Konrad's only worry was that I did not recover more quickly. From those secret nights of love between little Helga and me comes the poem:

String of Pearls

Abruptly at midnight I woke. Beside me my child laughs in its sleep. And the moon with its hard white shine looks in at the window, into the room. How the moonlight plays on the little head, almost as though it cooled the hot small hairs that stick damply about the little forehead. Suddenly a shudder runs across its face, and the mouth groans in a soft whimper, for all the world as if it suffered from the ground of the soul. By degrees the little sound of misery dies, as quickly gone as it quickly came. Only a deep sigh out of the breast slides slowly away. Then back to pleasure the sweet child's features smooth themselves deep in sleep. It seems to me as though it asked the thing that shadows my own mind so heavily: is this sorrow gone now for good? ... Smiling then, as though angels kissed it, it beds itself deeper at its mother's breasts, and the moonlight glides across it, cold and white. It shivers through my mind: these are shadow-pictures of your life that float through your soul in the dream. Shadow-pictures only, of happiness and pain, threaded one against another like pearls, until the white string of pearls runs out into the sand of eternity, my child!

When we came to Höckendorf that summer with the child, everyone was shocked at how wretched I looked, and said among themselves: “She will hardly last much longer.” — I had heard that, and once, on a day when I was lying in bed, the words: “Now we are among ourselves again.” — But I recovered very quickly in the good air. We were both very industrious again; I painted a poppy field for my angel of death “Asrael,”21 begun in Rome, having painted before it the picture “Lebenssphinx,” for which a sphinx from the summer and the shore at Nervi had given me the suggestion. —

Back in Rome again (little Helga at the breast was not too inconvenient on the long journey — we scared passengers off by flying nappies like flags) — I worked at the angel of death with a very good model, “Pia,” who also gave me my novella “Pia.” —

Pradilla, the great Spaniard22, visited us sometimes and took a great interest in the Asrael. (In little Helga too, who was turning into a beautiful child, and whom he always wanted to paint. Unfortunately it never came to that after all.) — We made friends with Villegas as well. His Moorish villa in the Campagna, our delight, Pradilla has long since sold; he lives again in a plain apartment in Madrid, where I visited him once, years later.

We sought contact with the artists' association, with the sculptors Kopf and Gerhard and some younger German artists who greatly disappointed Konrad. He then wrote his novel “Unter römischem Himmel,” which made a great deal of bad blood. A storm in a teacup! We also saw Fräulein Harry Hertz23 often, and her friend Dr. Mond from London. They lived in the beautiful old Palazzo Zurchari, owned costly old paintings and moved on the heights of life. — In the Palazzo Caffarelli, with the ambassador Bernhard von Bülow and his wife, we spent many an interesting hour. Professor Eberlein came to Rome on his honeymoon with his beautiful second wife. Now she is in a sanatorium, and he has taken a third. —

How many artists' destinies walked in through the Roman gates and were fulfilled. This many-coloured, many-coloured life! Sometimes the life of those days seems to me like a Roman girandola. It flowers up in a thousand sheaves of flame into the sky of life — and must go back again into the old night.

The Contessa Lara was another such sheaf of flame. Her poems are glorious. Her life less so. Eight days before she was murdered24 by her lover, the painter Pierantoni, she put her feet under our table with him. Yes, one lives through strange things and stories in Rome. — Old Count Schack, the poet and patron, whom I had known since my earliest youth and who once arranged my contact with Böcklin, we saw living himself to an end in Rome, and dying there. At eighty he still read us a classical love poem that the Colosseum had suggested to him that morning. With the poet-prince Emil Schönaich-Carolath, too, we were joined by a lively correspondence over long years, until his death. For years my children owed their Christmas marzipan to his kindness.

And with my old Darmstadt friend, the Princess Baratov, I came together again. She was very agreeably impressed by my husband and invited us again and again to her picturesquely exotic home in the Palazzo Barberini. Her reception hall was so large that she learned to ride a bicycle in it. A strange mixture, this descendant of Georgian kings! Hyperculture, barbarism, flaming sensuality and Russian eccentricity fought each other in her being. But she was a good study for Konrad.

My “Via passionis” had already been out for two years with “Reissner.” They were really only the poems that had come to me in the finding of him and at my husband's side. The book had brilliant reviews and a deep effect, and placed me in the front rank of women lyric poets25. Yes, in those days we felt the waves of life washing broadly round us!

Ring

My dearest gave me a ring, a little golden snake with ruby eyes, — never will this little snake suck heart's blood, the small thing sits loose on my finger. And I turn it, kiss it early and late: for it lies over that red stripe, that first ring's hoop of fire, whose trace has not faded in years, which the little snake now crowds out, the snake that owns my heart for all time! Golden emblem of golden eternities, hanging only loosely on my finger.

Björnson26 had come to Rome with his family, and a genuine friendship developed between the old poet and the young one. Every week the Björnsons came to us for an evening. Quite alone with them, the two of them were endlessly stimulating. We looked forward from one time to the next. Only little Helga looked forward less. The great Norwegian, with his stentorian voice, shouted the child awake every single time. And then the two of them would shout against each other. — The small creature showed more temperament every day, and we often had our work cut out with it. Especially “vecchia Maria,” when she walked with it on the Pincio. She was very proud of her charge. Once Helga was wearing a new sky-blue coat trimmed with fur, which her grandmother had sent. She wanted to show herself in it to her father, who had gone on ahead. But she thought the old woman was not quick enough about taking her to him. At that she ran, shaking with rage, out onto the roadway and rolled in the wet mud, like the child Alcibiades once, or like Fitcher's Bird in the fairy tale. Maria, trembling, snatched her back from the hooves of an oncoming carriage and had to hurry home with the screaming, kicking child to change it. The coat was ruined. Yes — the temperament left nothing to be desired! — An episode from one of our journeys to Höckendorf bears witness to it as well, which I described in this poem:

So One Day You Will

... And again the train roars off through the distance and bridges the poles of our life; from south to north goes the year's flight; — so we travel on, with the same strong striving as ever and always. The infant at the breast has already become a child with a thinking and a feeling of its own, with wishes of its own, a small pleasure of its own — how soon, poor thing, the world will cool you. But you, who know nobody but your mother — from the seat opposite, wildly into my arms it throws you, taking no heed of the gulf that parts us, — loud beats your heart, the small, love-warm one. ... So one day, when love calls, laughing still at its cliffs, you will fly over them — bold, and despising every gulf in life, to nestle close against the heart of your happiness.

German poets passing through sought us out as well. A friendship arose with Sudermann and with Fulda (whom his honeymoon brought there, with a wife from whom he has long since been divorced).

We lived in an atmosphere of art and beauty. When I think of it today my heart contracts with bitter pain. Why did our happiness last so short, ah so short a time! What a wonderful creating together as artists!

It was a hothouse atmosphere for all our artistic germs. They sprouted and shot up in swelling splendour. And yet one took all that glory — as something self-evident, until the shears of Atropos so suddenly cut through the golden thread of our happiness, until the shining web shrank together into ashes and rubble.

One very dear friend I did gain — Maria von Bülow27 —, the only one perhaps who will stay true to me until the grave! Perhaps — who can know! My faith in humankind has grown brittle. Konrad was jealous when I went to her, to her, my dear “Grussel.” Yes, that was a rich life. I could perhaps say with Goethe: — “The whole gain of my life is to weep for his (Konrad's) loss.” —

In the first spring we went to Sorrento. It had still been bitterly cold in Naples, but at Sorrento the orange harvest was in full swing. We stayed there in the Pension Loreley (the German name) together with the Ganghofers, whom we took very much to our hearts.

Then we made the closer acquaintance of Princess Gorchakov, a highly interesting woman of genius. She lived in the Villa Syracusa, a fairy-tale property with a royal view. She lived there with an English major-domo who tyrannised over her. It was endlessly interesting psychologically to watch this relationship. How the Englishman permitted himself everything, how the beautiful princess trembled before him. — —

I painted a great deal with her and bathed with her (I almost learned to swim). We also made beautiful excursions into the country, to Agerola and to the Deserto, with the princess and her gentleman. — The most wonderful thing of all, though, was the view from her marble balconies — the unbounded sea in the evening blood of the sunset. Truly, a spectacle for gods. — I saw the princess only once more, briefly, in Rome. In Paris, where I meant to visit her later, she was away travelling. Then, soon afterwards, she died. But her English “gentleman” grew ever fatter and more swaggering. —

Sorrento was very beautiful, unforgettable. —

Another time we were on Capri for the first weeks of spring. Little Helga was already chattering Italian there. We lodged up above, at the Francia; I painted for dear life. It was then that I saw again one of my earliest dancing partners, Rittmeister Cantor, who was married to a Capri woman — I have told the strange meeting at the beginning of these pages — and I saw the hermit Wedekind there, and almost nothing but originals. Capri breeds them! Then another “friend of boys” took his own life28. He was laid out, next to Pagano. A shattering sight. — Capri is, after all, the home of the love of boys. —

In Rome we also saw a great deal of the composer Alexander von Fielitz29, who set many songs of mine and Konrad's to music.

Best of all, I think, my “Sündflut.” Konrad's favourite poem out of the storm-flood of our love:

The Flood

“Ever hotter, ever hotter love speaks, ever softer, ever softer duty admonishes. Ever deeper, ever deeper the glow burrows, ever higher, ever higher the flood climbs. Ever further, ever further the land draws away, tighter I grip, ever tighter, your hand. The flood of sin breaks, wilder and wilder, in rapture — let us die, let us die — you and I!”

(The ending in particular is musically glorious.) Then Konrad wanted at last to carry a ten-year friendship by letter with Richard Voß over into life. We visited him and his wife, in those days still at the Villa Falconieri in Frascati, which now belongs to the Kaiser30 and has become an “artists' home”!31 In that time it was more untamed. The Villa Falconieri intoxicated us; Richard Voß, though, sobered us. I had heard so much in earlier days from Heyse about him and his wife, who had found each other in the institution for morphine withdrawal. Outwardly they now had a very conventional effect. Years before I had met them once at the Heyses'. Then they had seemed to me much more genuine and natural.

What a fullness of human and divine history walked past us in Rome!

In the afternoons, after the early midday meal, my husband went without fail up to the Pincio. The way we waved after each other, we must have been the laughing-stock of the whole Via Gregoriana.

Sometimes I painted in the gardens below the Pincio. Then I would stand up on a stone and wave. And he waved down from the Pincio café.

Vecchia Maria would then bring little Helga to the Sor Dottore, and he held her up there for hours on his lap, in the warm sun. I have never seen a more tender father. After sunset he came home, drank his cocoa and then usually read me Nietzsche. I lay on the divan while he did it. Ah, that glorious life! After supper he would often recite poems to me as well. (When I compared it with the life of misery at Oswald's side!) In the mornings, from nine o'clock on, the dearest one lay on his divan and wrote. He wrote all his novels lying down. He was not to be disturbed while he did it, and wrote until one o'clock, until pranzo. Only at eleven I brought him a glass of Marsala, quietly. But if something unpleasant had happened to me in the meantime, something that was hard to carry alone, I crept into the room on tiptoe and stroked his knees and his feet gently. Then he had such a good look for me, and comforted and strengthened I slipped out again. —

Why could this life not last longer? Why did everything have to be smashed, after five short years32, by the “hoof-beat of the horses at the chariot of fate”? Had I not suffered enough already? Was I not bound — flung so suddenly and abruptly out of such warmth of love, out of such understanding — to freeze to death in the lonely misery of all my later life? Once, my pomegranate flowers had found the right hand, in which they blazed up in glowing splendour; then the hand sank — and the pomegranate flowers fell in the dust. —

One thing I have bitterly repented — that I always let my husband go up to the Pincio alone, out of sheer “painting-mania.”33 What good did it do me in the end? How many good, happy hours I lost irrecoverably that way. —

One summer we did not go, as we did every other year, to Höckendorf, with the regular stay in Berlin and Munich beforehand, which we both always looked forward to. For on the way we visited our friends — Sudermann, Fulda, Ganghofer, Spielhagen — and revelled in German theatre. What lovely hours we always spent with the Spielhagens, our oldest friends! How we laughed when the poet showed us his arts of carving. When the largest roast, dancing free in the air on the fork, was masterfully taken apart by him. Spielhagen, who had once so horrified me as a young thing by telling me that the traits of the women characters in Problematische Naturen were taken from nothing but the “eight to ten women” he had truly loved! That, to me, who at the time still believed in the one single love! Where have they gone, the dear Spielhagens — the wind groans, the waves wander and surge. — —

That summer, then, we did not want — because of building alterations, I believe — to go to Höckendorf, but to meet the old lady at the great Hotel Penegal on the Mendel pass. That is to say, the really enormous hotel was still being built, but Frau Spreter's hotel too was much too large for our taste. The country there is glorious, half southern, half high-alpine in character. Maria Janitschek came closer to us there, and her friend Franz Evers. It was in the megalomania period of them both, but it was very interesting. We also met the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Este34 there, before he had married Countess Chotek (a niece of my old Munich friend Fräulein von Berckholtz). I often chatted with him; he was so delighted with my studies that I made him a present of one of them. He deigned most graciously and condescendingly to accept it — but did not return the compliment at my great Vienna exhibition later on! He was coming from India at the time, by the way, and found a resemblance between the situation of the Mendel and that of Darjeeling in the Himalaya. Later, when I stood in the Himalaya myself, I sometimes had to think of this — it was a resemblance like that of the cat to the lion. — — After that I had a one-woman exhibition in Munich. (I parted very unwillingly from Konrad for six weeks; he said: what is one married for, if one is not always together.) He himself went to Meran for that time. When I saw him again, I noticed for the first time a strange line of wretchedness in the dear, noble features. Was it already the Hippocratic line of death? — In Meran, by the way, his friend Grete W. had approached him again. “You are alone, darling? Let me nurse you!” But he was able to answer her: “I am expecting my wife in three days.” — I resolved now never to be parted from him again, for however short a time; he was so right: what was one married for! I was now expecting my second child. It was due at the beginning of May, and now the question arose where to go for that time. For Rome it was already too hot, and for Höckendorf still far too cool. We debated back and forth, and at last decided on Fiesole, above Florence. In February and March I still made many a Roman excursion with my friend Maria von Bülow. One of them went to Santa Maria di Galeria, the abandoned town in the Campagna of which Gregorovius tells so much. We drove in the Bülows' carriage and took a manservant with us for masculine protection, since for Konrad the expedition was far too strenuous. I brought back a skull I had dug up myself with the help of a campagnolo. Maria joked: “Four of us set out, five of us come back” (Maria, I, the unborn one, the skull and the servant). Another time we drove out at random through some gate or other, then left the carriage and set off on discoveries. Once we found a little Renaissance villa in the style of Palladio, lived in by goatherds, with roses flowering all round it. How many such corners there once were around my beloved Rome. —

In the middle of April we travelled with little Helga and Vecchia Maria to Florence and searched the neighbourhood there for a suitable hiding-place for my hard hour. How many Medici villas we discovered in the process. But most of them were far too remote for any help that might be wanted in the night. At last, in the Villa Montelatici on the market square of Fiesole, we found what we were looking for. The wise woman even lived close by.

We had a house full of our forefathers' furniture entirely to ourselves. Adjoining it was an immense wilderness of garden with rose hedges and little laurel woods, close above the slope from which the view of Florence with the Bramante dome offered itself to the eye, infinitely picturesque, across the plain and over the heights that lie about it. We were both enchanted with it. This villa or none! And we settled ourselves in here. The abundance of yellow roses in flower twined round every window. I counted no fewer than eleven baroque mirrors; it was a nest as if made for our outlandish artistic taste.

Vecchia Maria had of course to muck the place out thoroughly first. — All the laurels stood in fullest flower; the birds sang; we took long walks every day in the laurel woods round about. I arranged all the baby things in the cupboards; Konrad often drove down to Florence and brought me flowers and the choicest delicacies. It was a time full of unforgettable peace. — But the child would not and would not come. I painted picture after picture of the poetic rose garden; deep below us among the olives lay the Böcklin villa35.

When I think of those days a verse of mine comes back to me:

“The wind grumbles in the olives, rose hedges breathe out hot scent, wild wishes fell asleep long ago, the last dream flutters softly away.”

(Paul Umlauff set it to music years later.) And I think of the verses that call the lovely days of Fiesole back before my soul:

In the Garden of Fiesole

Early summer night high above Florence, in the garden of Fiesole, white in the flowering spring the tall lilies shimmer like snow. Nestled into your arms I walk through the vine alley, the moon's boat rocks in the ether — we are both of us afraid of the dream. From the slope we look in silence at lights beyond number, but shadows are walking as well down there in the valley of the Arno. All at once, a thousandfold, full of phosphor-blue light, through the roof of the olives it breaks in a trembling shining, and floats, in league with the secret, high above us and all around us, as though out of a far magic world, a firefly — a host of will-o'-the-wisps. It plaits a wreath of rays about the heads of us both, wrapping us in glow and glitter such as the world will never believe. It seems to me that all we ever made that was great, or loved — or thought — in the garden of Fiesole sparkles through our night.

On a shimmering May morning, the fourteenth, my husband wanted to talk me into driving with him to a flower parade in Florence. — “It is not the least bit strenuous.” — But it seemed wiser to me to stay at home.

After the meal I set out with Vecchia Maria and little Helga on a longish walk towards Settignano, into the high cypress wood. After half an hour I thought it advisable to turn back; a slight pain in the small of my back was making itself felt. At first I paid it little attention. But these pains grew stronger at every step. In the end I had to sit down with little Helga under a cypress and send Maria to Fiesole for a carriage. But since it was Sunday, she thought it uncertain whether this carozza could be found at once. She set off at a run. Her absence seemed an eternity to me; I was almost unconscious with pain. Helga cried; I scarcely heard it. At last, at last, a Fiesole state coach came up at a hurrying jog-trot. But the coachman and Maria had to lift me into it; I no longer knew where I was. How I felt every jolt on that bumpy road! We should never reach the end of it! On the market square the Sunday crowd stood head to head. “Povera Signora,” they murmured, “povera Signora,” contemplating my pain-distorted features with knowing pity. In the villa the wise woman was already coming out to meet me, Maria having sent her word. The two of them carried me pickaback up the short flight of stairs, and up there on the bed — I still had my hat on my head — the first cry of our second child rang out soon afterwards — our Inge Assunta! For she was a child of the Ascension!36

“Sor Dottore, Sor Dottore,” I heard the old woman shouting soon afterwards, “una bella, bella bimba.”

Konrad would not believe it; it simply was not possible. And then he kissed the tiny hands: “There is nothing else in the world so sweet and so tiny.”

The levatrice had had to go out into the country. In the night a doctor had to be called in. I was saved as if by a miracle. Death had gone by. The poem refers to that:

Inge Assunta

I hear it still, the shrill sound of the bell. It was in the night, the black night, when you came to us, child of spring, Inge Assunta! Hurricanes of spring raced through the world and sang their old song, their song of fate. In plunging streams the rain slapped, scattered by the storm, against rattling panes. In the dark garden the roses were torn apart, the purple, glowing roses of love, but you lay beside me, my child of spring, Inge Assunta. There it sounds, the shrill note of the bell, again and again — in the hurricane of spring. When they hurried to open, no one stood outside; for the one who waited outside and pulled at the cord37 went by once more — once more — when you came, Inge Assunta. — — — — — — — — — I hear it still, the shrill sound of the bell.

The newborn proved to be very energetic. When it was first put to the breast it bit on so hard that I fainted and had to be held up by two women.

That is how the young of a beast of prey must bite!

O my beloved Inge! What means to become a hook bends itself in good time!

Springs of Life

Come, bed your little red-blond head here against my breasts! Here are your springs of life, suck yourself fast to them! Clench the tiny fists, shake your round head, burst the eardrum of whoever robs you of your mother38. For out of her you are to draw nourishment, rest, strength, and pride and courage for living, fire and passion. If one day you take after your father in spirit, as you already do today in the eyes, then, to use your inheritance to the full, defy the world into giving you your fate. Even now, do it in defiance of them all, my dearest, my never-satisfied one, suck, until my heart has given you the very last drop as well.

We had no cradle, so we laid it in a drawer indoors and in a travelling trunk in the garden. We were pursued the whole time by the fear that the trunk might snap shut and suffocate the newborn.

Konrad surrounded me with such touching care that one day the wise woman asked confidentially: “Scusi, ma — sono leggitimi?” (Are you legitimately married?)

A severe bronchial catarrh came upon me soon after my first outing. Only slowly could I recover! Meanwhile down in the garden the white lilies were flowering by the hundred, and their heavy scent surged through the air. In the evenings I was never allowed into the damp gardens. That was a real grief to me. For the glow-worms flamed there in their hundreds of thousands. It was a birthplace as if made for a poet's child.

I now sewed it a little May-green hat with a May-green veil. And at last, at last, we were able to set out with the two little ones on the journey to Germany. With nappy-flags briskly hoisted we scared off many an inexperienced passenger.

At Höckendorf I soon recovered from the last exertions. Helga had by then unlearned her Italian for the second time and was chattering German when she went back to Vecchia Maria in Rome. I myself was very industrious at Höckendorf on pig studies for my new Circe picture39. At six o'clock the swineherd blew his horn through the village. At that all the pigsties opened, and their inhabitants ran out and off with the Pomeranian Eumaeus into the light-green beech wood. I too followed in his tracks for many weeks together, armed with painting things. For Konrad an inexhaustible mine of teasing!

When we had got through the journey back, that autumn and winter turned out particularly lovely. Countess Bülow had promised to present us at the Roman court of Queen Margherita.

So Konrad gave me a splendid gown for Christmas: “orange silk in the Empire style, with black fur trimming.”

Our Christmases altogether!

This one, though, was the loveliest of them all. We were both great lovers of antiques. And this time we had outdone ourselves at it. We had hunted out downright wonderful things for each other. The delight of us both accordingly knew no bounds. And we had found a real, genuine, big German Christmas tree! On it hung a hundred golden oranges, and a hundred wax candles shone. Helga, jubilant with recognition for the first time, stretched her little arms out towards it. Inge Assunta I nursed under the tree. She still sucked with quite unusual energy. Then the children were put to bed, and Konrad read me the loveliest and dearest things he knew. He read very well, although his voice had grown rough and broken with the illness. We drank our punch and nibbled at the choicest Christmas sweets. It was so warm and bright, indoors and out. And before us lay the golden-rich life — a future full of fame and love!40