As I expected, when we left the Jews’ quarter
the elders of our party wished to return to the hotel.
But now, instead of rejoicing in this, as I had done
beforehand, I felt a sudden overpowering impulse to
go on at once to the bridge, and put an end to the
suspense I had been wishing to protract. I declared,
with unusual decision, that I would get out of the
carriage and walk on alone; they might return without
me. My father, thinking this merely a sample
of my usual “poetic nonsense,” objected
that I should only do myself harm by walking in the
heat; but when I persisted, he said angrily that I
might follow my own absurd devices, but that Schmidt
(our courier) must go with me. I assented to
this, and set off with Schmidt towards the bridge.
I had no sooner passed from under the archway of
the grand old gate leading an to the bridge, than a
trembling seized me, and I turned cold under the midday
sun; yet I went on; I was in search of something—a
small detail which I remembered with special intensity
as part of my vision. There it was—the
patch of rainbow light on the pavement transmitted
through a lamp in the shape of a star.
CHAPTER II
Before the autumn was at an end, and while the brown
leaves still stood thick on the beeches in our park,
my brother and Bertha were engaged to each other,
and it was understood that their marriage was to take
place early in the next spring. In spite of
the certainty I had felt from that moment on the bridge
at Prague, that Bertha would one day be my wife, my
constitutional timidity and distrust had continued
to benumb me, and the words in which I had sometimes
premeditated a confession of my love, had died away
unuttered. The same conflict had gone on within
me as before—the longing for an assurance
of love from Bertha’s lips, the dread lest a
word of contempt and denial should fall upon me like
a corrosive acid. What was the conviction of
a distant necessity to me? I trembled under
a present glance, I hungered after a present joy, I
was clogged and chilled by a present fear. And
so the days passed on: I witnessed Bertha’s
engagement and heard her marriage discussed as if I
were under a conscious nightmare—knowing
it was a dream that would vanish, but feeling stifled
under the grasp of hard-clutching fingers.
When I was not in Bertha’s presence—and
I was with her very often, for she continued to treat
me with a playful patronage that wakened no jealousy
in my brother—I spent my time chiefly in
wandering, in strolling, or taking long rides while
the daylight lasted, and then shutting myself up with
my unread books; for books had lost the power of chaining
my attention. My self-consciousness was heightened
to that pitch of intensity in which our own emotions
take the form of a drama which urges itself imperatively
on our contemplation, and we begin to weep, less under
the sense of our suffering than at the thought of it.
