Immensee and Other Stories

by Theodor Storm

  “What do you have against our nice doctor and his wife?” Rudolf asked.

  She nestled tightly into his arm. “Nothing,” said she, “but it was so beautiful this evening; I must be quite alone with you.”

  They quickened their homeward pace.

  “Look,” he said, “there is a light in the downstairs room; old Annie has no doubt got the tea-table ready. You were right; it is better to be at home than with others.”

  She merely nodded and quietly pressed his hand. Then they entered their house; quickly she opened the parlour door and pushed back the curtains.

  On the table where the vase of roses had once stood a great bronze lamp was now burning, lighting up the head of a black-haired child which had drooped in sleep upon her thin little arms; the corners of a picture-book stuck out beneath them.

  The young wife stood in the doorway as if petrified; the child had disappeared entirely from the sphere of her thoughts. A trace of bitter disappointment flitted about her pretty lips. “You, Aggie!” she managed to say, when her husband had led her fully into the room. “What are you doing here?”

  Aggie awoke and jumped up. “I wanted to wait for you,” she said, half smiling and passing her hand over her blinking eyes.

  “That was wrong of Annie; you should have been in bed long ago.”

  Inez turned away and went to the window; she felt the tears welling up out of her eyes. A mass of bitter feelings swirled in her breast, beyond disentangling; homesickness, self-pity, regret for her lovelessness towards the child of the beloved man; she herself did not know how much came over her now, but, and with the voluptuousness and the injustice of pain she stated it to herself, this was it: her marriage lacked youth, and yet she herself was still so young!

  When she turned around, the room was empty. Where was the nice hour she had looked forward to? It did not occur to her that she herself had spoilt it.

  The child, who had witnessed with almost frightened eyes this to her incomprehensible happening, had been quietly led away by her father.

  “Patience!” he said to himself, as he went up the stairs with Aggie, his arm embracing her, and he too, though in another sense, added: “She is still so young.”

  A whole series of ideas and plans arose in him; mechanically he opened the door of the room where Aggie slept with old Annie, and where the latter was already expecting her. He kissed her and said, “I will say good night to Mama for you.” Then he was about to go down to his wife, but he turned around again and went into his study at the end of the corridor.

  On the desktop stood a small bronze lamp from Pompeii, which he had but recently acquired and experimentally filled with oil; he took it down, lit it, and replaced it under the portrait of the deceased; a glass with flowers in it, which had been standing on the desk, he stood beside the lamp. He did this almost without thinking; only as if he must give his hands something to do while his head and heart were engaged. Then he stepped up to the adjacent window and opened both casements.

  The sky was full of clouds; the light of the moon could not get through. Down below in the little garden the rampant shrubbery looked like one dark mass; only over yonder, where the path led to the reed hut through the black pyramids of the conifers, the white gravel shimmered between them.

  And out of the man’s imagination, as he looked down into this solitude, issued a lovely figure which no longer belonged among the living; he saw her walking on the path below, and it seemed to him that he was walking at her side.

  “Let the memory of you strengthen me for loving,” he said, but the dead woman gave no answer; she kept her lovely pale face inclined towards the earth; with a sweet shuddering he felt her nearness, but no words came from her.

  Now he recalled that he was standing up here all alone. He believed in the full seriousness of death; the time when she had been was now past. But below him lay the garden of her parents, as it had always been; looking up from his books and through the window, it was there that he had first seen the girl, then scarcely fifteen years old, and the child with the blonde braids had carried off the thoughts of the serious man, more and more, until at last she had crossed the threshold of his house as wife, bringing back to him all this and more. Years of happiness and of joyful productiveness had entered in with her, but when her parents had died and their house was sold, they had kept the little garden and had united it by means of a gate in the boundary wall with their own great garden. Even at that time this gate was almost hidden under overhanging bushes, which they allowed to grow unchecked; for they walked through it into the most intimate spot of their summer life, to which even their best friends were but rarely admitted.

  In the reed hut, in which he had once watched from his window the youthful sweetheart doing her schoolwork, there now sat a child with dark, thoughtful eyes at the feet of her blonde mother, and whenever he turned his head away from his work, he enjoyed a glimpse into the fullest happiness of human life. But death had secretly sown his seed there. It was in the first days of June that they bore the bed of the gravely ailing wife from the adjoining bedroom to the study of her husband; she wanted to keep about her the air that blew into the open window from the garden of her happiness. The great desk was pushed to one side; all his thoughts were now with her. Outside an incomparable spring had come to life; a cherry tree stood there snowed in with bloom. In an involuntary urge he lifted the slight figure from the bed and carried her to the window.

  “Oh, just look at it! How lovely the world is!”

  But she gently rocked her head, saying, “I don’t see it any more.”

  And soon it had come to the point where he could no longer interpret the whispers that came from her lips. Fainter and fainter gleamed the spark; only a painful twitching stirred the lips, the breath came with harsh groaning in the battle for life. But it grew softer and ever softer, at last as gentle as the hum of a bee. Then for one last time it was as if a blue ray of light passed through the open eyes, and then came peace.

  “Good night, Marie!” But she was beyond hearing.

  One day more, and the silent, noble figure lay downstairs in its coffin in the large dim room. The servants walked about softly; he stood inside next to his child, whom old Annie was holding by the hand.

  “Aggie,” said the latter, “you’re not afraid, I hope?”

  And the child, touched by the exaltation of death, answered, “No, Annie, I am praying.”

  Then came the final journey, the last he was permitted to take with her; without priest or the peal of bells, as they had both willed it, but in the holiness of early morning, as the first larks were mounting high in the air.

  That was over now, but he still possessed her in his grief; though unseen, she still lived with him. But this too faded away unnoticed; he often sought her in terror, but less and less often could he manage to find her. Now his house did indeed seem to him weirdly empty and desolate; in the corners dwelt an obscurity which had never been there before; all about him was so strangely different, and she was nowhere.

  The moon had come out from behind the cloud-banks and was brightly illuminating the garden wilderness below. He was still standing at the same spot, his head resting against the window bars, but his eyes no longer saw what was outside.

  Then the door opened behind him, and a dark and beautiful woman came in.

  The soft rustle of her dress had found its way to his ear; he turned his head and looked searchingly at her.

  “Inez!” he cried; the tone was impetuous, but he did not go towards her.

  She had stopped short. “What ails you, Rudolf? Do I startle you?”

  He shook his head and tried to smile. “Come,” said he, “let us go downstairs.”

  But as he took her hand her eyes had fallen upon the picture lit up by the lamp and the flowers close by.

  Her features revealed a sudden flash of understanding.

 
; “Your room is like a chapel,” she said, and her words sounded cold, almost hostile.

  He had understood everything. “O Inez,” he cried, “are not the dead sacred to you too?”

  “The dead! Who would not keep them sacred! But Rudolf,” and she drew him back to the window; her hands trembled and her black eyes flickered with agitation, “tell me, who am now your wife, why do you keep this garden locked up and never let any human foot enter it?”

  He pointed downward; the white gravel between the black shrub-pyramids had a ghostly gleam; a great night moth was just flying across it.

  He had looked down in silence. “That is a grave, Inez,” he said now, “or, if you prefer, a garden of the past.”

  But she looked at him with passion. “I know better, Rudolf! That is the place where you are with her; there on the white path you stroll together; for she is not dead; even now, in this very hour, you were with her and were accusing me, your wife, before her. That is unfaithfulness, Rudolf, you are committing adultery with a shadow!”

  In silence he put his arm around her and led her, half by force, away from the window. Then he took the lamp from the desk and held it up to the picture. “Inez, take just one look at her!”

  And as the innocent eyes of the dead girl looked down at her, she burst out in a flood of tears. “O Rudolf, I feel that I am growing wicked!”

  “Do not weep so,” said he. “I too have done wrong, but you must have patience with me, too!” He pulled out a drawer in his desk and laid a key in her hand. “Open up the garden again, Inez! Truly, it will make me happy if your foot is the first to re-enter it. Perhaps she will meet you there in spirit, and will look at you with her mild eyes so long that you will put your arm around her neck like a sister!”

  She looked without moving at the key, which still lay on her open palm.

  “Well, Inez, will you not accept what I have given you?”

  She shook her head.

  “Not yet, Rudolf, I can’t just yet, but later – later; then we will go in there together.” And as her lovely dark eyes looked pleadingly up at him, she quietly laid the key on the desk.

  A seed-corn had been laid in the ground, but the time of germination was still remote.

  It was in November. At last Inez could no longer doubt that she too was to become a mother, mother of her own child. But with the delight that came over her at this realization something else was soon associated. Something like an uncanny darkness lay over her, out of which, like an evil serpent, one thought gradually emerged. She tried to drive it away, she fled from it to all the good spirits of her house, but it pursued her, came again and again and in increasing power. Had she not merely entered this house externally and as a stranger, a house that already comprised a complete life-unit without her? And a second marriage, was there any such thing? Must not the first marriage, the only one, endure until the death of both? Not only until death! Further, too, further, to all eternity! And what then? The hot flush rushed to her face; lacerating her own flesh, she clutched at the harshest words. Her child – an intruder, a bastard in its own father’s house!

  She went about as if annihilated; she bore her young bliss and woe alone, and when he who had the best right to share it with her looked at her in question and concern, her lips closed as if in deadly fear.

  In the conjugal chamber the heavy window shades were let down, and only through a narrow crack between them did a strip of moon­light steal in. Inez had fallen asleep amid torturing thoughts, and now the nightmare; now she knew; she could not stay, she must leave this house, taking only a small bundle with her, and then go, far away – to her mother, never to return! Out of the garden, behind the spruces which formed its rear wall, a gate led into the open; she had the key in her pocket, she would leave at once.

  The moon moved forwards, from the bedstead to the pillow, and now her lovely countenance lay fully bathed in its pale gleam. She raised herself up. Noiselessly she got out of bed and put her bare feet into the shoes standing ready for her. Now she stood in the middle of her room in her white night robe; her dark hair hung over her breast in two long braids, as she was wont to do it at night. But her figure, usually so elastic, seemed to have shrunk; it was as if the burden of sleep were still resting upon her. Gropingly, with outstretched hands, she stole through the room, but she took nothing with her, no bundle, no key. As her fingers touched her husband’s clothes lying on a chair, she hesitated for a moment, as if another idea were gaining ground in her mind, but immediately afterwards she stepped softly and solemnly out of the bedroom door and went down the stairs. In the hall below the front door lock clinked, cold air blew upon her, and the night wind lifted the heavy braids on her breast.

  How she had got through the dark grove that lay behind her she did not know, but now she heard sounds bursting forth from the thicket on every side; the pursuers were behind her. In front of her rose up a great gate; with all the strength in her little hands she swung open one side of it; a desolate, endless heath spread out before her, and suddenly it was swarming with great black hounds, who were running towards her at full speed; she saw the red tongues hanging out of their steaming throats, she heard their baying come closer… louder…

  Now her half closed eyes opened, and gradually she began to grasp the situation. She realized that she was standing inside the big garden; one of her hands was still holding the latch of the iron gate. The wind was playing with her light nightgown; from the lindens, which stood at one side of the entrance, a shower of yellow leaves whirled down upon her. But – what was that? From the fir trees over there, just as she had thought she was hearing it a moment before, came the baying of a hound at this moment, and she distinctly heard something bursting through the dry twigs. A mortal fear fell upon her. And again the baying resounded.

  “Nero,” said she, “it is Nero.”

  But she had never made friends with the black guardian of the house, and involuntarily she let the real animal fuse with the fierce beasts of her dream, and now she saw him bounding towards her in great leaps from the other side of the lawn. But he laid himself down before her, and with unmistakable whimpers of joy he licked her bare feet. At the same moment footsteps came towards her from the courtyard, and a moment later the arms of her husband were embracing her; in deep security she laid her head on his breast.

  Aroused by the barking of the dog, he had looked at her place in the bed beside him in sudden fright and found it empty. Suddenly a dark pool gleamed before his mind’s eye; it was on a country road only a thousand yards away from their garden under dense willows. He saw himself standing with Inez on its green bank, as they had done a few days before; he saw her going in among the reeds and throwing a stone she had picked up on the road into the deep water. “Come back, Inez!” he had called out, “it is not safe there.” But she had remained standing, her melancholy eyes staring into the circles that slowly widened out on the black surface. “I suppose it is bottomless?” she had asked, when he finally snatched her away in his arms.

  All this had raced wildly through his head as he dashed down the stairs to the courtyard. Then too they had left the house through the garden, and now he found her here, almost unclothed, her lovely hair moist with the night-dew which was still dripping from the trees.

  He wrapped her in the shawl he had thrown over his own shoulder before coming down. “Inez,” he said, his heart pounding so violently that he spoke almost roughly, “what is this? How did you get here?”

  She shivered and shrank.

  “I don’t know, Rudolf. I wanted to leave. I had a dream. O Rudolf, it must have been something fearful!”

  “You had a dream? Really, you had a dream!” he repeated, and he sighed deeply, as if freed from a heavy burden.

  She merely nodded and let herself be led back into the house and bedroom like a child.

  Then when he gently took his arms away, she said, “You are so silent,
of course you are angry?”

  “How should I be angry, Inez? I was afraid for you. Did you ever dream like that before?”

  At first she shook her head, but then she thought again. “Yes I did once; only there was nothing terrible about it.”

  He stepped to the window and drew back the curtains, so that the moonlight streamed full into the room.

  “I must see your face,” he said, as he drew her down on the edge of her bed and then seated himself at her side. “Now will you tell me what nice things you dreamt that other time? You needn’t speak loudly; in this delicate light even the softest sound strikes the ear.”

  She had laid her head on his breast and looked up at him.

  “If you would like to know,” she said, thinking back. “It was on my thirteenth birthday, I think; I had quite fallen in love with the Child, the little Jesus, and didn’t want to look at my dolls any more.”

  “In love with little Jesus, Inez?”

  “Yes, Rudolf,” and she nestled still more tightly in his arm, as if to sleep there, “my mother had given me a picture, the Madonna with the Child; it hung in a pretty frame over my little work table in the living room.”

  “I know the one,” he said, “it is still hanging there; your mother wanted to keep it as a memento of her little Inez.”

  “O my dear mother!”

  He drew her more tightly to him; then he said, “May I hear some more, Inez?”

  “Of course! But I am ashamed, Rudolf.” And then continuing softly and hesitantly: “On that day I only had eyes for the Christ child; in the afternoon, too, when my playmates were there, I secretly crept up to it and kissed the glass over his little mouth. I felt just as if it were alive. I wished that I could take it in my arms like the mother in the picture!” She stopped; at the last words her voice had dropped to a mere whisper.

  “And then, Inez?” he asked. “But you tell it so uneasily!”

  “No, no, Rudolf! But in the night that followed I must have got up in my sleep; for on the next morning they found me in my bed fast asleep, with the picture in my arms, and my head on the broken glass.”