Das landhaus am Rhein. English

by Berthold Auerbach

  CHAPTER IV.

  BELLA'S LEGACY.

  When the Doctor came with the Professorin, he was highly rejoiced thatAdams had left the house, and still more that the Major was able to situp in bed, and smoke his long pipe. After enjoining upon him greatquiet, he went with the two women into the sitting-room, and thereinformed them that he had reason to be proud; for Bella had written tohim from Antwerp, and to no one else. He read the letter to them whichwas as follows,--

  "You alone are no puppet; you never made a pretence of friendship forme, and therefore you shall have a keepsake. I give you my parrot. Theparrot is the masterpiece of creation: he says nothing but what he istaught. Adieu!

  "BELLA."

  The ladies exchanged glances of surprise; and Fraeulein Milch rejoicedthe Doctor by saying, for once in her life, an unkind word; for shecould not help expressing pleasure that Frau Bella had come to such anend. The Doctor, on the other hand, said, in a tone of complaint,--

  "I feel a want now that she is gone. I miss in her a sort of barometerof thought and an interesting object of study. Strange! now that thiswoman is gone we see, for the first time, how widely her influence wasextended,--more widely perhaps than was her due. But still the storypleases me, as a proof that there still exist persons of courage andstrong will."

  "You like eccentricity," suggested the Professorin.

  "Oh, no! What seems eccentric to others appears to me the only naturaland consistent course, Bella could not have acted otherwise than shehas: this very step was a part of her heroism. Your son can tell youthat I suspected something of this sort before it happened. There ismuch in common between Bella and Sonnenkamp. Both are quick and clearin judgment where others are concerned; but, when self is touched, theyare tyrannical, malicious, and self-asserting. And, now that she isfairly gone, I may say that she has fled a murderess: to be sure, shedid not kill Clodwig with poison or dagger, but she smote him to theheart with killing words and thoughts. He confessed to me that it wasso, and now I may repeat it."

  "I am confounded," said the Professorin. "With all her culture, howwere such things possible?"

  "That was just it," broke in the Doctor delighted. "All thisintellectual life was nothing to Frau Bella: she found herself in it,she knew not how. She had to destroy something, or what would she havedone with all this culture? Formerly there was hypocrisy only inreligion; now there is hypocrisy in education. But, no: Frau Bella wasno hypocrite, neither was she really ill-natured; she was simplycrude."

  "Crude?"

  "Yes. Thought of others educates at once the heart and the mind; FrauBella thought only and always of herself; of what she had to say and tofeel."

  "Do you think," asked the Professorin with some hesitation, "that thesetwo persons can be happy together for a single hour?"

  "Certainly not, according to our ideas of happiness. They have no realaffection for each other: pride and disappointment, and a desire toshock the world, have induced them to make their escape together. Thereis one other motive which persons like us cannot enter into. I triedfor a long time to discover it, and believe at last that I havesucceeded: it is the consciousness of beauty. I am a beauty: that is aprinciple on which a whole system is founded. Other people are onlymade for the purpose of seeing and admiring the beauty. Bella committedan act of treason against herself when she married Clodwig: she couldnot have done it except in a moment of forgetfulness of this greatprinciple. But how can we judge such people aright? The longer I live,the more clearly I see that human beings are not alike: they are ofdifferent species."

  "You want to provoke us by heresies."

  "By no means: that is the reason why this anti-slavery fever isdistasteful to me. This claiming equality for all men is a wrong."

  "A wrong?"

  "Yes. Men are not all the same kind of beings; one is a nightingalethat sings on a tree; another is a frog that croaks in the marsh. Now,to require of the frog that he should sing up in a tree is a wrong, aperversion of Nature. Let the frog alone in his marsh, he is very welloff there, and to him and his wife his song sounds as sweet as that ofthe bird to his mate. Men are of different kinds."

  The Major called from his room to know what the Doctor was talking soloudly and excitedly about. Fraeulein Milch soothed him by telling himit was nothing for a sick man to hear, though she confessed that theyhad been talking of Bella. As she re-entered the sitting-room, amessenger arrived from Villa Eden with intelligence which summoned theDoctor and the Professorin thither instantly: Frau Ceres wasdangerously ill.

  The Doctor and the Professorin made all haste back to the Villa.