Atlantis. Gerhart Hauptmann

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СКАЧАТЬ somewhat too forwardly, from where he was sitting a little distance away. He was still flirting with the English lady from Southampton; but now, irresistibly drawn to Mara's sphere, he jumped up and left her, bringing the tone that was agreeable to Mara and all her admirers, except Frederick von Kammacher. The jolliness of the little group communicated itself to the rest of the promenade deck.

      Disgusted with the orgy of banality, Frederick moved off to be alone with his thoughts. The deck, which in the middle of the day had been dripping with water, was now quite dry. He walked to the stern and looked out over the broad, foaming wake. He heaved a deep breath of joy at the thought that he was no longer in the narrow spell of the little female demon. Suddenly the long tension of his soul relaxed. Though he might have suffered a profound disenchantment, yet he felt as if he had taken a sobering bath, which left him a free agent, alone with his own soul. He felt ashamed of his instability. His passion for that little person seemed ridiculous, and he covertly beat his breast and rapped his forehead with his knuckles as if to awaken himself from a dream.

      But, finally, the great cosmic moment of the slowly setting sun cast its spell over the young German adventurer.

      A fresh wind was still blowing from the southeast, slanting the vessel slightly to the side where the sun hung over the horizon, turning the heavens in the west into a great, dusky conflagration. That sun, beneath which a slate-coloured sea was rolling in waves gently tossing foam—that sea, slate-coloured in the east and a cold, darkening blue in the west and south—that sky above, with great masses of clouds—these were to Frederick like the three mighty motives of a world symphony.

      "Any one who is susceptible to them," he thought, "has no real cause to feel small, for all their awful majesty."

      He was standing near the log, the long line of which was trailing in the ocean. The great ship was quivering under his feet. From the two smoke-stacks the wind was pressing the smoke down over the waves, and a melancholy procession of figures, widows in long crêpe veils, wringing their hands in mute grief, drifted away backward, as if into the twilight gloom of eternal damnation. He heard the talking of the passengers, and represented to himself all that was united within the walls of that immense house, hurrying forward restlessly—how much hunting, fleeing, hoping, fearing. And in his soul, responding to the universal miracle, arose the great unanswered questions that seek to penetrate to the dark meaning of existence: "Why?" "What for?"

XIII

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      He began to pace the deck again without noticing that he drew near Ingigerd Hahlström.

      "You are wanted," a voice behind him suddenly announced. Seeing how he started, Doctor Wilhelm excused himself.

      "You were dreaming; you are a dreamer," Mara called. "Come over here. I don't like these stupid men."

      The six or eight gentlemen in attendance, with the exception of Achleitner, laughed and withdrew with a humorous show of great obedience.

      "Why do you stay here, Achleitner?" Thus the faithful canine received his dismissal.

      Frederick saw how the men withdrew together in groups at a little distance, whispering as they usually do when having sport with a pretty woman who is not exactly a prude; and it was with some shame, at any rate, with expressed repugnance that he took the stool still warm from Achleitner's body. Mara began to rhapsodise about nature.

      "Isn't everything prettiest when the sun goes down? I think it's fun—at least I like it," she quickly substituted, when Frederick made a wry face at the remark. She spoke in sentences that all began with "I don't like," or "I despise," or "I do detest." In the face of that vast cosmic drama unfolding itself before her senses, she sat wholly unmoved and unsympathetic, displaying the overweening arrogance of a spoiled child. Frederick wanted to jump up, but remained where he was, pulling nervously at the end of his moustache, while his face assumed a stiff, mocking expression. Mara noticed it, and was visibly upset by this unusual form of homage.

      Frederick had one of those idealistic heads set on broad shoulders characteristic of certain circles in the "nation of poets and philosophers." His ancestors had been scholars, statesmen, and soldiers. The general, his father, was in externals wholly the soldier; but beneath his uniform, his heritage from his own father, a renowned botanist, director of the botanical gardens at Genoa, actively manifested itself in a strong interest in science. Frederick's mother was a well-read woman, passionately fond of the theatre and an enthusiastic lover of Goethe and the poets of the romantic school. Her father, who had been prime minister of Wittenberg, as a student and even later in his career, composed poetry, which her adoring love for him had caused her to publish and several times revise and reprint.

      Though Frederick had never been ill, there were times when he showed symptoms of a peculiar passionateness. His friends knew that when all went well, he was a dormant volcano; that when things did not go so well, he was a volcano spitting fire and smoke. To all appearances equally removed from effeminateness and brutality, he was subject, nevertheless, to accesses of both. Now and then a dithyrambic rapture came over him, especially when there was wine in his blood. He would pace about, and if it was daytime, might address a pathetic, sonorous invocation to the sun, or at night, to the constellations, particularly to the chaste Cassiopeia.

      Since she had known him, Mara felt that his proximity was by no means lacking in danger; but being what she was, it piqued her to play with fire.

      "I don't like people that think themselves better than others," she said.

      "Being a Pharisee, I do," Frederick drily rejoined, and went on cruelly: "I think for your years you are extremely forward and cock-sure. Your dance pleases me better than your conversation." He felt much like a man berating his sister.

      Mara silently studied him for a moment, a suggestive smile on her lips.

      "According to your notions," she finally said, "a girl mustn't speak unless she's spoken to, and she mustn't have any opinions of her own. You look as if the only sort of girl you could love would be one that was always saying, 'I am a poor, ignorant thing. I don't understand what he sees in me.' I hate such nincompoops!"

      Conversation came to a halt. Frederick half rose to leave, but she restrained him with a self-willed, pouting, "No." There was something childlike and honest in that pouting "no" which touched his soul and drew him down on the stool again.

      "In Berlin, while I danced, I always had to look at you," she continued, holding her doll against her lips so that her little nose was a bit flattened. "The very first time I saw you, I felt something like a bond between us; I knew we should meet again."

      Frederick started, though not for an instant deceived, knowing this must be an oft-used formula for establishing a relationship, and in essence a lie.

      "Are you married?" he heard before he had fully recovered his balance. He turned pale. His answer was hard and repellent.

      "It would be well, Miss Hahlström, if you were to examine me more closely before you treat me as one among many. So far, I don't believe in the bond that unites us. During your dance you looked not only at me, but at everybody else." He spoke with increasing coldness. "At any rate, it doesn't in the least concern you whether I am, or am not, married—just as little as it concerns me what repulsive personages, whom nothing but a depraved instinct can enjoy, you keep company with." He meant Achleitner.

      Ingigerd gave a short laugh. "Do you take me for Joan of Arc?"

      "Not СКАЧАТЬ