Elective Affinities
I
Highly-esteemed Madam,—I venture to write these lines to you in the firm belief that you, like all women of mental distinction, love the unusual, and hate to the utmost the commonplaces of ordinary conventionality....
Having left the company, and wending my lonely way through the streets of Berlin, I felt myself to be in a state of lively excitement. The events of the evening passed once more before me, and ere long I was in that incomprehensible mystical mood, which comes so suddenly we know not how or whence. I was quite capable of calling to the spirits that seemed to float about me: “Answer me, if ye hear me!” when the sound of a passing carriage called me back to reality, and my gaze turned from the stars of heaven to a pair of star-like earthly orbs whose mild light shone for a passing moment with full radiance into my soul.
These starry eyes belonged to a young lady who was seated by your side in the carriage. At that moment I was seized with the purpose I am now carrying out.
I herewith enclose an unsealed letter to the lovely possessor of those gleaming stars, and I leave it to your never-erring tact to decide, after having read the letter, whether you will hand it to the young lady, who is doubtless one of your intimate circle of acquaintances, or consign it to the atoning flames of your grate.—Yours most sincerely,
Von Sch.
II
Highly-esteemed Miss,—If Frau von B. should decide to give these lines into your hands, I shall consider it as a mark of confidence in me which encourages me in a measure to express to you a very singular request, as I am about to do. Perhaps you would have the goodness to look upon this mark of confidence on the part of so admirable a lady as a sort of pledge of my character, on the strength of which you will kindly permit me to conceal my name and social functions. At the same time I shall endeavour, dear Fraulein, to remain in complete ignorance so far as you are concerned.
After these preliminaries touching the scenic arrangement, permit me to come to the point.
I am sure you, as well as most persons possessing a lively imagination, have had occasion in life to observe the following occurrence. We stroll through the crowd of a large town thinking of nothing in particular, and indifferently passing a thousand faces that meet ours with the same indifference....
And in the midst of this placid, colourless mood we are suddenly surprised and fascinated by a pair of eyes that unexpectedly emerge out of the senseless crowd to meet ours for a second and then to disappear again. But what a wealth of experience lies in that passing moment! We know for certain that never in our past life has that face crossed our path, but the sight has touched us with an electric thrill. And as our soul rises into our eyes to greet that other soul, a hundred questions and answers fly back and forth with the rapidity of lightning.
“Who art thou? I have so much to say to thee. Secrets I scarce dare whisper to myself, I would entrust to thee. I feel that there is an invisible band between us.”
“Ah, I feel it too! It would bind us closer than all other human bands.”
And then comes the fear of making oneself ridiculous, and all the tame considerations that hamper every pure and fresh impulse. And all this, dear Fraulein, you and I have experienced. Our souls have met and recognised each other. This is a mighty fact, which you felt as well as I three days ago as your carriage crossed the Kurfürsten Bridge. If we were to meet now in society, the ordinary conventional preliminaries of getting acquainted would take away our naïve impression, we should be bereft of that elemental undeviating conviction which constituted the mysterious charm of our meeting. Let us then remain strangers to each other outwardly, trusting only to these first glowing intuitions.
Let us exchange a few letters, freely and without a thought to conventionality. Their contents shall bind us to nothing in real life, and should we meet by some strange accident, they shall be but a memory.
Do not, I beg of you, listen to the faint-hearted criticism of reason, but follow the first hearty impulse of your soul. It will lead you aright.
With warm sympathy,
The Unknown of the Kurfürsten Bridge.
III
Dear Sir,—I have decided to answer your interesting letter. Frau von B. is to read all letters that pass between us, so that I can enter upon this correspondence with a happy sense of freedom from responsibility.
I am weary of the dryness of ordinary intercourse, and there is nothing I should like better than to talk to a man for once without reserve. I drop my worsted-work as the prisoner drops his chains, and dip my pen into the ink with the thrilling rapture of dawning freedom.
Do you know what it is to do worsted-work? Have you ever thought about this last reminiscence of mediæval times, this glaring anachronism in a time of steam and electricity and enlightenment?...
Liberty flows and surges about us, and life brings forth thousands of rich blossoms, and we sit imprisoned and—do worsted-work, or drum on the piano, murdering Chopin, or if we are very clever, sing Schumann’s songs with the pathos of dilettantism.
When I met you on the Kurfürsten Bridge, Frau von B. and I were just coming home from a ladies’ party, to which all the guests had brought their worsted-work. I had really suffered under the unendurable weight of conversation on topics of the utmost indifference, under a hypocritical interest in things which cannot possibly interest anybody. My heart was full of bitterness, and on the way home I was considering the question whether such a life was worth living, whether it would not be wiser to run away, to adopt the garb of a man, and try one’s powers boldly in the stream of life.
At that moment I saw you, and I felt all that you speak of in your letter. In that short second in which our eyes met, pictures clearly defined and wondrously bright arose before me.
Dressed as a youth, I seemed to descend from my carriage and seize your hand, and you knew all. Silently we walked through the streets, hand in hand, until we reached your house. There, I told you everything about my lonely childhood, my joyless youth, and the world of dreams and ideals within me. You spoke earnest words of duty and work, called me your friend, and said we would go along part of the way side by side....
After a winter of severe work came bright, sunny days of spring, and I felt at last that in the arms of nature, at her pure altar, I had received a “purer life, and the glad courage of hopeful youth.”
I hope you will return my frankness in full. When we end our correspondence, and return after this bold aside into the track of everyday life, perhaps we shall bring back some new, fresh courage, and the graceful memory of having been for once in our lives as foolish as we pleased.
Kind greetings from your
Unknown.
IV
Highly-esteemed Unknown Friend,—Your amiable letter made me supremely happy. Now I know without a doubt that the mysterious quality of reading the soul of a being akin in spirit is no empty illusion. In that deeply mystical moment I recognised your charming self just as you describe it with winning simplicity. What you write me in many pages I have read word for word out of your eyes. And now that I know how near you are to me in sympathy and in intuitive understanding, now I have so much to say to you, so much to receive from you, that it were a crime not to tear down the paper barriers between us and to replace the dead letter by the living word.
I only await your permission. I promise myself a great deal from this meeting, perhaps a friendship for life, and I warmly beg you to look upon the unusual beginning as an earnest of a happy end.
Hoping impatiently for a gracious reply, I am, your truly devoted,
Unknown.
V
Dear Friend,—Allow me to tell you that, in spite of your somewhat too lively imagination, I have always looked upon you as a person of much sense, and that there is nothing that moves me more to pity than to see a sensible man attacked by a fashionable craze like spiritualism. I am always seized by the desire to heal the patient, which seems the more difficult the absurder—forgive the word, but I know no better—the cause of the attack.
I hope you will laugh heartily over the following story, and have a healthful feeling of convalescence when you have bravely conquered the first bitter taste of the medicine.
A young widow, living in great seclusion, allows an old friend of her husband’s to persuade her to make a concession to him and to the carnival, and visit a masked ball at his house, in company of her brother, a comely school-boy.
The latter, dressed as a young lady looks charming, makes countless conquests at the ball, and rides home at night in an open carriage with his sister, wrapped in a charming evening-cloak of hers, flushed with champagne, and with the triumphs of the evening.
And lo and behold, upon the Kurfürsten Bridge the glowing eyes of the lad make, as it seems, a deep and lasting impression!
A few days later the widow receives a very remarkable letter from a friend, which tempts her irresistibly to give him a lesson, which I am sure he will have the kindness to take in good part.
She put herself as far as possible in the mood of her ecstatic friend, rummaged among her youthful reminiscences, and composed an answer which puts her friend quite beside himself, and convinces him that there is such a thing as mysterious sympathy of soul, electric glances, mystic bands, spirit kisses, etc., etc.
And now—what do you say?
In a gay carnival-humour, your old friend,
Alexandra von B.
VI
Dispatch.
Frau Alexandra von B——, H—— St.
Had a photograph taken immediately upon receipt of your letter, to preserve the unutterable expression it produced upon my visage.
Shall take the liberty of presenting you with a specimen ere long. Acceptance to be looked upon as an act of penal justice. In abject humility at having made an everlasting fool of himself, your friend,
Von Sch.
Franz von Schönthan.