TWO STORIES
481
sought in vain, as though in a refuse heap, some remnant of faith,
of joy, of life, that inside these souls such flowers could spring up?
Arrived home, the writer shut the door behind him and lay
back in his easy chair. Notebook in hand, he read through his jot–
tings attentively and found that they were worthless, that they con–
tributed nothing, that they only hindered and obstructed. He tore
out the pages and carefully destroyed them and decided not to write
down anything more. In agitation he lay there seeking composure,
and suddenly another piece of the dream emerged. All at once he
saw himself again in the unfamiliar house, waiting in the bare en–
trance hall, saw in the background an anxious old lady in a dark
dress moving back and forth, felt once more the moment of fate:
that now Magda had gone to bring him his new, younger, fairer,
his true and eternal beloved. Kindly and anxiously the old woman
looked over at him-and behind her features and behind her gray
clothes other features and other clothes were discernable, faces of
attendants and nurses out of his own childhood, the face and gray
housedress of his mother. And so from this layer of memories, from
this motherly, sisterly circle of pictures, he felt the future, the beloved,
growing to meet him. Behind this empty entrance hall, under the
eyes of anxious, sweet, devoted mothers and maids, had grown the
child, whose love was to bless him, whose possession was to be his
happiness and whose future was to be his own.
Magda, too, he now saw again; how she greeted him without
a kiss so tenderly and earnestly, how her face had once more con–
tained, as though in the golden light of evening, all the magic it
had once held for him, how at the moment of renunciation and part–
ing she once more shone with all the amiability of their happiest
times, how her thoughtful, serious countenance heralded in advance
the younger, fairer one, the true, the only one, whom she had come
to bring him and to help him win. She seemed to be a symbol of
love itself, her humility, her pliability, her half maternal, half child–
like magic power. All that he had ever read into this woman, all
that he had dreamed and wished and invented for her, all the glori–
fication and worship he had offered her in the high time of his love,
were concentrated in her face, her whole soul and his own love shone
visibly from her serious, lovely features, smiled sadly and kindly from
her eyes. Was
it
possible to take leave of such a beloved? But her
glance said: parting must be, way must be made for the new.
