Читать книгу The Children of the World - Paul Heyse - Страница 7

"So you, too, are beginning to scold," said Edwin, drinking the remainder of his milk as if it were the most exquisite nectar. "But the trump of doom would not disturb the serenity of my soul to-day. I am in exactly the phlegmatic, abstract frame of mind, to which the most difficult problems seem like child's play. It is a pity I have nothing harder to elucidate than how it comes to pass that a crazy man can say such clever things in his dreams, and yet on awaking be just as mad as before."

"What do you mean?"

"I have been most dutifully dreaming of the acquaintance I made yesterday; you remember, child, la belle Chocoladière. I discovered, God knows how, that she was the daughter of a Polish countess and a French valet de chambre; a thoroughly ignorant, vain, and not over-virtuous creature. As she made merry over my defective French, I quietly began to explain how grateful she ought to be that a sensible man conversed with her at all. Then I talked long and very impressively about the dignity of man in general and philosophers in particular; something after the style of Wieland's sages, and she, after at first looking as if she were grieving over her weaknesses and sins, suddenly began to laugh loudly, danced around the room--in the style of the rope-dancers we saw yesterday--hummed French songs of by no means the most decorous nature, and altogether conducted herself in such a manner that I grew more and more angry, and at last told her to her face that I should consider myself the most contemptible fool and weakling on earth, if I allowed her little nose and black eyelashes to turn my head an instant longer. She now became very haughty, I still colder and more bitter, she more bacchanalian, and I was just in the act of jumping out of a low window into a beautiful and spacious garden, when she coaxingly passed her hands over my face, and tried to smooth the angry frown from my brow; then I awoke, and quickly perceived that notwithstanding all the wisdom I had possessed in my dream, I had not become one whit the wiser than I was when I went to bed.

"But don't take the matter so much to heart, child," he continued, as Balder remained silent. "I can assure you that a hopeless passion is no such terrible misfortune. I am perfectly positive that I shall never see her again, but how long it will be before I think of something else, I can't say. Yet it is one of the most delightful experiences--this gentle consuming fire, this sacred defencelessness, this introspection, joined to the consciousness of external impressions; it is the true, immanent, and transcendent contradiction, which is the veritable secret of all life, and of which man, with his accustomed eminently respectable but imperfect knowledge of our being, is seldom so keenly conscious. Some day, child, you too will experience it, and then for the first time you will fully understand what I mean. The head does not appear to work at all; the mill of ideas is stopped; it has no more grist to grind. Very different nerve-centres appear to have assumed control, and when I have overcome the first sense of strangeness, it will be a very interesting psychological task--"

Here the door was thrown open, and a new visitor interrupted our philosopher's attempt to make a virtue of necessity, and at least to render useful to the cause of science, the sorrows of his heart.