46
PARTISAN REVIEW
unintelligibly at first, later he heard these words:
In this world I have no joy at all
But my sweetheart, and he's away.
This struck home, the words and the intonation almost destroyed him.
Madame Oberlin looked at him. He took heart, could no longer en–
dure to be silent, he had to speak about it: "Dearest Madame Ober–
lin, couldn't you tell me what's become of the lady
5
whose fate lies so
heavy on my heart?"-"But Mr. Lenz,
I
don't know anything about
it."
Then he was silent once more and began to pace the room,
briskly from one end to the other and back again; but soon he
paused to say: "Look here, I'll leave; 0 God, you're the only people
with whom I could bear to live, and yet-and yet I must go, to
her–
but I can't, I mustn't." He was greatly excited and left the house.
Toward evening Lenz returned, the room was in twilight, he sat
down beside Madame Oberlin. "You see," he resumed, "when she
used to walk through the room, singing half to herself, and every step
she took was a kind of music, there was so much happiness in her,
and that overflowed into me, and I was always at peace when I
looked at her or when she leaned her head against me, and-she
was wholly a child; it seemed as if the world were too wide for her,
she was so retiring, she would look for the narrowest place in the
whole house, and there she'd sit as though all her happiness were con–
centrated into one little point, and then I thought so too; then I
could have played like a child. Now I feel so hemmed in! so restricted!
You see, sometimes I feel my arms colliding with the sky; oh, I'm suf–
focating. And often at those moments I think I'm suffering physical
pain, there, in the left side, in my arm with which I used to hold her.
And yet I can no longer picture her, the image runs away from me,
and that torments me; only at times everything becomes clear and
bright and I feel quite well again." Later he often returned to this
subject when speaking to Madame Oberlin, but always incoherently;
she could not reply at great length, but consoled him a little.
Meanwhile his religious torments continued. The emptier, the
colder, the more dead he felt inwardly, the more he was urged to
kindle some kind of heat within; he remembered the times when
everything seethed within him, when the ardor of all his emotions
(
Continued on page
133)
